The Present of Galicia Embracing the Past

"To collect photographs is to collect the world. Photographs are to capture momentary reality. In terms of the value of discovering something, the camera can be the ideal eye. Also, the act of taking a photograph is to make the subject one's own, and it means to engage oneself in a certain relationship with the world." (See On Photography by Susan Sontag)

Unquestionably, photography is a fragment of the world, a miniature version of reality as well as can be enlarged and modified. Above all, photography is valuable as the record of the reality of ‘being there at that time.’ The nature of photography which is presupposed by this function and value makes a premise that photography is what contains the object and the moment. Teyé takes these analog photographs of the traditional culture of the Galicia region in Spain from the perspective of the 21st-century nomad. According to the emulsion ratio, he completes the platinum print, a traditional technique with abundant shade and hue expression and excellent preservation.

In Galicia, in northwestern Spain where Teyé lives, is the ‘Old Town of Santiago de Compostela’ that was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The city has the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela built with the moods of Romanesque, Gothic, and even Baroque as the destination of the Catholic pilgrimage route since the 9th century. "Although the history of Galicia began at the peak of the Iberian Peninsula in 3000 BC, in the territory of Galicia (archaeological sites, tombs, dolmens, etc.), traces of megalithic stones dating back to 4300 BC are intricately scattered. There were the horse figures on the Parada petroglyphs excavated from this period in Montes de Taboexa. Other similar petroglyphs exist in the Sabucedo area. It is where the tradition of the Galician Celta ancestors, ´Rapa Das Bestas´, continues until these days.

Teyé takes these analog photographs of the traditional culture of the Galicia region in Spain from the perspective of the 21st-century nomad.

In the era of advanced science in the 21st century, the COVID-19 pandemic has come. It is a fear that anyone would have experienced. In the case of Teyé who experiences this disaster in a place deeply engraved with the legend of Galicia's plague, however, it is time to contemplate hell, purgatory, and heaven. Because he has the anxiety of death and childhood fearful memories of the book, The Story of Samsara and Karma: A Road Without a Beginning or End written by Buddhist monk Ilta. It was a moment of panic that anyone experienced as encountering empty roads and closed stores in the early COVID-19 catastrophe. "Coexistence" in present Galicia which embraces the past, must be a significant opportunity to explore the traditional culture that has continued for hundreds of years in the artist's challenging life transition.  In the era of high technology while the sweep of the virus disaster, Teyé attempted to produce artworks refreshingly recognizing traditional culture at the point of "the present of Galicia embracing the past."

In the 14th century, about half of the European population died of the worst plague. After this historical tragedy, as the plague spread sporadically until the 19th century, mankind has changed not only in population distribution but also in politics, religion, society, culture, and economy. Human has been traumatized by the war against viruses. I cite an article about photographs by Teyé who started them at a time when everything stopped due to the COVID19 pandemic. " <The Day Everything Turned Gray (COVID-19)>: Under lockdown, Teyé began his first artwork on the traditional process of Fine Art. The oldest, modest, and bustling neighborhood of the city full of life's energy turned into an isolated, abandoned, and frozen timed gray space. In unrealistic times like Luis Buñuel’s movies, Teyé set out on his way to document his forced silence from the gaze of a wandering poet armed with cameras, notebooks, and pencils."

Just as Henry Fox Talbot of the UK, who invented Calotype in 1941, considered cameras as the "pencil of nature," Teyé looks at the past through the present in the place where traditional photographic process, notebooks, pencils, and 21st-century COVID-19 overlapped with the legends of Galicia in which 16th-century plague swept away. ‘His critical and optimistic view’ captures the culture of ´Rapa das Bestas´ in a conventional way through Platinum printing. With this artisanal process by his hands, he sublimates what he witnessed.

"The <Galicia Series>, my first solo exhibition in Korea, explores the concepts of Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell through ´Rapa das Bestas´, one of the traditions from the Celta era in the Iberian Peninsula. My artwork is a record of my journey to find myself as a photographer and as a nomad of the present age. Sometimes it is beyond the boundaries of impression and expression and the choice of the subject and object." (Interview with Teyé)

His exhibition follows the flow of local traditional consciousness (or traditional culture) that the villagers herd horses living grazed in the mountains to shave them with bare hands. With the relationship between nature and human beings, life and death, tradition and contemporary, individuals and clusters, you and I, what is invisible and visible, etc., his exhibition has the photography capturing "the moments of seeing and feeling with the eyes of nomads in the 21st century." "The traditional culture of Galicia and the untamed wild horses reflect me. I couldn't figure out how my perception of this culture projects into traditional culture and the individual wild horse or herd. In my youth, I couldn't blend what I felt into a different culture. Neither did I assimilate in Korea. Life of a diaspora, there is no sense of homogeneity regarding anywhere, makes me feel like an invisible man." (Interview with Teyé)

"Though my early photographs were Pictorialist, for the photographs of wild horses, I took an approach of Straight Photography. In my early stage, I struggled with the issues like the value of photography, the meaning of a subject, or painting-like photos and photo-like paintings." Likewise, Teyé pondered the relationship between the technique and the subject. He had questions regarding the various methodology to represent the relationship between what photography aims for and it’s practice on field.

Through the objectification of one's identity or of sensibilities about tradition beyond, photographs containing traditional Spanish culture are the time to face the present self. The image captured at the moment shows the entire landscape and the flow of the conventional  ´Rapa das Bestas´ of the tradition of the Celta people, an ethnic group in Spain. The long history ritual the Celta people follow is about the traditional breeding of horses. Unlike domesticated horses, the Celta people release horses to graze in the mountains, shave them once a year, and brand new foals and newly identified horses. It is their traditional breeding horse method."

<Purgatory :Limbo> the main poster of this exhibition, presents the oak vine with a hand about to touch it, as if the image symbolizes snakes and Hawwāh. <ao curro> brings us to the present and future of two different generations handling Galician wild horses. The Stones and dry branches reflect on the surface of clear and calm water in  <Salvación>. In front of <Aloitador>, who rides Galician wild horses, we can fall into metaphorical and piecemeal thinking for a shepherd.

With his artworks, Teyé asks himself what coexistence means, what the relationship between the protection of and binding on wild horses is, what taming is, and where we should direct customs and education. He inquiries about where the boundaries of what invisible and visible are, while human lives in their cultural communities. Teyé would like to know where the camera lens reaches beyond those boundaries. He captures the traditional culture of Korea and Spain in his photographic essays, and with a classical technique from the invention of photography dating back to early 19th century, he explores the existence through the coexistence of tradition and contemporary and past times.

Furthermore, by blending own emulsions, his photographs coordinate various shades from black to white, gray from black to reddish-brown, and delicate and rich tones we cannot obtain from Gelatin silver prints. Teyé’s work represents details from the various middle tones to dark ones and emphasizes a vivid three-dimensional effect with profound and delicate highlights. It must be these level of expressions that make him insist on Platinum printing process, which requires a lot of time and efforts.

Although Teyé majored in advertising and worked as an executive creative director in a global advertising companies, he decided to become a Photographer during his successful life. Perhaps the time people need a critical change in their life is the time that intersects life’s peak and the moment of desperate desire. However, everyone is hardly able to choose to change. Teyé is the one who made the transition. To follow his new path, Teyé has been educated in photography institution and is focusing on the traditional photographic processes that gradually becoming obsolete. The moment to look, feel, and perceive a subject for photography is not only the present also the past. It is because at the same time we grasp the present, it turns into the past. Therefore, as his photography contains the challenge to handle the relationship between the existence of memory and time, the photo by Teyé are the gaze of his photo essay that is the memory of possible encountering with me and you.

Above all, the meaning of photography is the sensory integration that the eyes and hands reach. It is also the capture of the present moment embracing the past. Then, what is the relation between catching the moments and photography? What the photograph represents is the very event that cannot be existentially repeated, and specific objects are a prerequisite. A picture, a 'genuine directive language,' is the overlap between the object and the eyes to perceive it and the dissimilarity. However, the formation of an image occurs with the imperceptible duality, the moment you capture while looking through a camera lens, and the choice of the very moment and the object. It is due to the optical device with the effect of lights on an object. The chemical reaction of the subject results in the return to the past, which occurs in all photographs. It has the immutable property of time through instantaneous capture (see Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes).

Likewise, the photo essay by Teyé is an objectification of his identity or the sensibilities beyond the lens as well as a return to the present already becoming the past or self-revelation towards an immutable cycle. This time of return or cycle is his photo essay which is the time to perceive and is in the middle of traditional photographic process by encountering the very moment the past and the present, convention and contemporary, and others and selves combine. 

(Okreal Kim / Art critic, Director of Contemporary Art Research Institute)

 

More about Teyé:

Website: www.teye.co

Instagram: @taejaylee