Ki Seul Ki: Liquid Light

Chapter II will present Ki Seul Ki’s solo exhibition Liquid Light at its exhibition space in Yeonnam-dong from May 30 to July 3, 2026. During her residency at Chapter II in 2024, the artist continued her photographic practice while persistently exploring the processes of image-making and the conditions of the photographic medium. Liquid Light reveals the process of image generation through camera-less photography, presenting this inquiry as both a subject and a space for contemplation.

Artist Statement (2026)

Photography has always pointed to something outside itself. An image is understood as evidence of something beyond it — a subject, an event, a place. Working with photography as a medium, the artist has long grappled with a paradox: the artist's intervention is concealed behind the traditional assumption that a photograph shows reality “as it is” — and with how to bring that paradox to the surface. The exhibition Liquid Light takes the process of image-making itself as its subject, through the practice of cameraless photography.

​

Liquid Light is a photographic term referring to liquid photographic emulsion — a mixture of gelatin and silver halide in fluid form. It also describes the method of this work. In conventional photography, light strikes the emulsion and produces an image. Here, that role is taken by the artist’s gaze. Chemicals flow and react across a surface, and in doing so, they make the image. The structure remains the same; what changes is the agent that produces the image.

​

The material is a color chart — a tool designed to measure how closely a printed image matches an original. Ki takes that premise as a starting point. Selecting colors from the chart and printing them onto photographic paper, she then mixes bleach and ink remover directly on the surface, adjusting their concentration as they react. When a tool built for precision dissolves under the influence of chemicals, what becomes clear is that the standard of representation was always, first, a material one.

​

Instead of pressing a shutter, she handles chemicals. Instead of choosing a subject, she sets the conditions for a reaction. The flow and interaction of chemicals across the surface determine the form. Where they touch first, color lifts first; layers reveal themselves as they disappear, in the order they were laid down. What remains on the surface is not a representation of the outside world, but a trace of the conditions under which the image came into being — where the chemicals soaked in, where color collapsed, where her hand stopped. These become the content of the image. What is left on the surface is not a subject, but the act of her intervention itself. She makes that visible, and in that moment, a photograph is made.

​

The forms that remain gesture toward landscapes of things we cannot directly see — perhaps a depth of the ocean, perhaps a far edge of the universe. In the process of erasure, the image is recorded; in the process of collapse, it becomes all the more vivid.