Reading Room and Photo Room | Walkie-Talkie Gallery

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Reading Room and Photo Room

In October 2024, Walkie-Talkie Gallery presents its first collaboration with the publisher SUPERELLIPSE . The exhibition is divided into two rooms: Reading Room—SUPERELLIPSE, featuring twelve years of publishing through publication lists and physical books, and Photo Room—Park Sungsoo, introducing (revised)img_0001.jpg, Park Sungsoo’s first photobook. This exhibition frames the room, the most personal of spaces, as two realms of text and image, inviting a slower, more attentive engagement with words and photographs, the fundamental materials and tools of creation. The term “museum,” which once referred to an ancient temple, was used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries less as a name for a specific building and more as a designation for a collection of objects assembled by a single collector. Amidst these lists of books and photographs, this space hopes to become a place where visitors may trace the lists back to the person who compiled them, and imagine and empathize with that presence...

Reading Room and Photo Room

In October 2024, Walkie-Talkie Gallery presents its first collaboration with the publisher SUPERELLIPSE . The exhibition is divided into two rooms: Reading Room—SUPERELLIPSE, featuring twelve years of publishing through publication lists and physical books, and Photo Room—Park Sungsoo, introducing (revised)img_0001.jpg, Park Sungsoo’s first photobook. This exhibition frames the room, the most personal of spaces, as two realms of text and image, inviting a slower, more attentive engagement with words and photographs, the fundamental materials and tools of creation. The term “museum,” which once referred to an ancient temple, was used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries less as a name for a specific building and more as a designation for a collection of objects assembled by a single collector. Amidst these lists of books and photographs, this space hopes to become a place where visitors may trace the lists back to the person who compiled them, and imagine and empathize with that presence.
Founded in 2012, SUPERELLIPSE is an architectural design office, publishing house and gallery established by architect Chung Hyun. The name SUPERELLIPSE comes from the superellipse equation in which a geometric form shifts according to its variables. Stars, rhombuses, ellipses… each shape emerges as the variables change; and as those variables expand infinitely, the form approaches a rectangle, infinitely close. At first glance, stars, rhombuses, ellipses and near-rectangular forms appear entirely different, yet within the superellipse equation they are different, yet alike; alike, yet different. For publisher Chung Hyun, variables may take the form of scale, such as books, furniture, spaces and cities, or of collaborations, involving writers, photographers and designers. Each variable resolves the superellipse equation in its own way.

Over a span of twelve years and two months, SUPERELLIPSE has published thirty-two books. Publishing is a practice that demands many resources, such as the labor and extensive time of writers, editors and designers; and the capital required to secure paper and printing. While it may be possible to produce a few books through the sheer romance of publishing, sustaining a publishing practice year after year for more than a decade requires something beyond such romance—a sustained personal commitment and an irreplaceable sense of pleasure. What, then, has driven SUPERELLIPSE to continue publishing? For publisher Chung Hyun, publishing is an outward extension of the inward act of writing. For him, a book functions as a reduced model of architectural practice and an experiment that tests it, and at times as its point of departure. He approaches the page as he would a building: exploring its material conditions and imagining where the book will ultimately arrive. For him, architecture is the act of “compiling all the drawings across scales, large and small”; in this sense, “architecture itself becomes a form of publishing a book composed of text and images.” For him, books and architecture move toward one another, reflect one another, and resemble one another. At the same time, for him, books and architecture operate through action and reaction.

In October 2024, SUPERELLIPSE published (revised)img_0001.jpg, the first photobook by photographer Park Sungsoo. Having worked for a decade as a commercial photographer, he approached each assignment with professional rigor. From 2013 to 2023, he continued to photograph scenes independently without request or directive, compiling selections from them and making them into a book. He pressed the shutter “when what seemed clear suddenly appeared unfamiliar, or when what was previously unseen came sharply into view.” Park personally selected and sequenced the images, assembling them into a PDF file. More time and care were devoted to editing and arrangement than to the act of photographing itself. The individual images are sometimes described as “photographs easily consumed on a phone or monitor,” even as “meaningless images,” yet as these photos moved from screen to page, and from page to book, they acquired form and presence. For designer Shin Shin, Park’s photographs became material for “experiments in the surface and structure of print,” and their expansion into publishing and exhibition opens new possibilities for images once considered meaningless.

Park refers to these photographs, somewhat self-mockingly, as “images without informational value.” By this, he means that he photographed these images without clear intention or message. He describes them instead as fragments of vulnerability and traces of injury. He considers them in need of revision. For him, editing became a process of rearranging wounds, of reconnecting broken pieces, which is why revision was repeated so insistently. His photobook, (revised)img_0001.jpg, is composed of loose sheets, each detachable. Anyone may further revise, reorder, or re-edit these wounds.

This exhibition at Walkie-Talkie Gallery, Reading Room—SUPERELLIPSE, gathers SUPERELLIPSE’s past publications into a single space. Books weighing over two kilograms sit alongside books weighing just sixteen grams; volumes spanning 1,026 pages appear next to those of only twelve; there are also books within books, and books whose pages all detach. Through these works by SUPERELLIPSE, the exhibition offers a space to consider both the act of structuring books and the physical properties and structures that shape them. In Photo Room—Park Sungsoo, eight images are selected from a total of 152. Some follow the artist’s original layout, placing two images side by side within a single frame, while others are presented separately. The exhibition invites viewers to consider what visual possibilities emerge when photographs step outside the page and into space.

Curated and written by Nari LIM, CEO of Walkie-Talkie Gallery