The 021 Gallery in Daegu is hosting Nocturama, a solo exhibition by artist Kwon Do-yeon, from March 13 to April 29, 2026.
This exhibition serves as a comprehensive showcase of Kwon’s artistic evolution since 2021, featuring 20 major works from her acclaimed series including Nocturama, Twinkling, and Wave.
Known for using photography to summon fragments of memory into reality and document the spaces left behind by vanishing beings, Kwon offers a profound meditation on time and existence.
The title Nocturama is borrowed from the nocturnal animal house at the Antwerp Zoo described in W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz.
Much like the novel's narrator who faces the abyss of time while exchanging gazes with animals behind glass in artificial darkness, Kwon uses her camera to deeply contemplate the drifting entities that inhabit the night.
Her primary series, also titled Nocturama, captures shimmering figures moving through the silence of the dark while the world sleeps.
The camera's flash in these pitch-black settings often overexposes or blurs the subjects, visually representing the elusive nature of memory that remains just out of reach. By capturing moments that turn into the past the instant light touches them, she highlights the inherent quality of photography to "cut out" pieces of our present.
In the series Twinkling, Kwon documents life within "ecological niches," such as the isolated green spaces and islands along the Han River estuary.
In these trapped locations between major highways like Olympic Bridge and Haengju Bridge, which act like social black holes, the artist encountered wildlife such as wildcats, raccoons, and water deer.
This two-year project lyrically captures the faint light and vitality emitted by these creatures, serving as both a record and a mournful tribute to things that are fading away.
Completing the exhibition's narrative is her new work, Wave, which tracks the 400km journey of a specific fox (KM-2121) from Sobaeksan to Haeundae.
Kwon performatively followed the fox's path, viewing the landscapes and time through its eyes to convey the message that forgotten memories eventually return to those who cannot let them go.
By embracing the traces of others' time and space within her frame, she likens the return of these memories to the inevitable surge of an incoming tide.
Kwon Do-yeon emphasizes in her artist notes that there are radiant beings in this world that absolutely must be recorded.
She believes that facing and documenting these entities in the darkness is not merely a matter of technical observation but a profound ethical commitment.
Having been recognized for her unique artistic vision as the recipient of the 10th Ilwoo Photography Award in 2019 and the inaugural Ralph Gibson Award in 2023, Kwon invites viewers of this exhibition to experience her affectionate yet relentless gaze toward the beings that remain wide-eyed even in the deepest night.
