Boomoon is a Korean photographer currently working in Seoul and Sokcho. Boomoon studied photography at Chung-Ang University in Seoul after studying painting in high school. He opened his first solo exhibition at Seoul Press Center in 1975. His works, which captured street scenes of Seoul, Daegu, and Busan in dark atmosphere, received either extremely good or extremely bad responses. These dramatic differences in critique encouraged the artist to ponder about his photography and pursued to be a professional photographer with theory.
Boomoon has been engaging with natural landscapes in his work as a mean of self-reflection, producing large scale photographs of vast expanses of sky, sea, and land. He compared the landscape with "a cloud afloat in the wind": "it takes form in accordance with the receptiveness of my spirit and my capacity for interpretation. Fluid, it fluctuates; it is a process of exchange between me and the visible world." Therefore, viewing landscapes ultimately means discovering and reflecting upon oneself. The stillness and the solitude emanating from the works of Boomoon do not only depend on the fact that there is no human presence. The viewers in front of his works are themselves utterly left alone. That's a sine qua non to experience a landscape. Solitude has to be overcome to stroll in the image.
Boomoon has exhibited internationally and his works are held in many private and public collections including Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, Korea; Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan; Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; Hana Bank Collection, Seoul, Korea; JGS Foundation, New York; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea; Art Bank of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea.
