Carter and Kwak 

This is a series of photographs that combine the upper half of the face of an American president taken from the cover of TIME magazine with the lower half of the artist’s own face. In this way the works combine a well-known “face of the world” with a barely-known “face of the self.” The resulting images confuse viewers, making them question their knowledge of faces that they feel they should know. That’s because “faces of the world” are ultimately no more than media images seen in photographs and on TV. In looking at the works, a clear but ironic contrast comes to the surface: between people whose existence appears to be absolute but proves to be a chimera, and a person whose existence appears insipid and powerless but is actually real. The artist, who was born in Kyoto and became a Zainichi Korean (Korean resident of Japan) after World War II, has always addressed issues of the self being seen as an outsider in society. A similar stance can be discerned in this series.
(HIBINO Miyon)