At the Threshold is a two-person exhibition featuring Woo Changwon and Henrik Strömberg, artists based in Korea and Berlin respectively. The exhibition title, Threshold, refers to the point of transition from one world to another. Here, it signifies the boundary where the familiar begins to be perceived anew. Although the two artists approach their subjects in different ways, both invite viewers to encounter the familiar world through a renewed perspective. For them, photography is not merely a medium for documenting reality, but a method of exploring the world itself.
Woo Changwon contemplates everyday subjects over extended periods, translating the qualities he perceives into images. Rather than focusing on the objects themselves, he is interested in the process of coming to know them, capturing the moment suspended between seeing and thinking. Even when looking at the same subject, what one notices and how one receives it inevitably differs from person to person. His work suggests that an image is formed not solely by the object itself, but through the viewer's own perception and lived experience. As viewers follow the artist's prolonged act of observation, they are invited to reconsider the subject through their own way of seeing. Ultimately, Woo's photographs do not simply present objects; they encourage us to reflect on the very way we perceive the world around us.
Henrik Strömberg works with objects marked by the passage of time—trees, stones, plants, and other everyday materials. He removes them from their original contexts and places them into new relationships, allowing familiar objects to be perceived as entirely different presences. Sometimes he relocates them, sometimes reveals only fragments, and sometimes combines disparate elements into new sculptural forms. What matters is not what these objects originally were, but what they become within the frame before us. Rather than prescribing a singular meaning, Strömberg constructs open images filled with subtle clues, inviting viewers to generate new relationships and meanings through their own memories and experiences.
Working within the shared medium of photography, the two artists investigate their subjects through fundamentally different approaches. Woo Changwon explores how perception is formed through sustained observation, while Henrik Strömberg investigates how meaning emerges through the displacement of context. Their photographs exist at the threshold between the familiar world and one newly perceived.
The threshold begins with the world itself—with the familiar objects that surround us each day. To cross it is to encounter those objects anew, allowing perception to shift. At the end of that journey, viewers find themselves confronting not only the work, but also their own memories, sensations, and inner landscape. Rather than offering a fixed interpretation, the exhibition opens a channel for contemplation, allowing each viewer's thoughts to flow according to their own experiences and sensibilities. Where that current ultimately arrives is not within the object itself, but within the viewer's own interior—a place that only they can truly enter. (text by. Jiwon Lee)
