Seung Woo, Baek

Born in Seoul, Korea, photographer Seungwoo Baek has steadily presented his series The Windows and Korea since his 2007 exhibition featuring objects in a hotel. After publishing a photo essay book in 2013, he released My Korea, an English-language photo essay collection, in 2016. The book was selected as a 2016 Sejong Book of Korea by the Korea Publishing Culture Industry Promotion Agency and received favorable reviews both in the domestic market and on international Amazon platforms. He later published My Seoul in 2018 and My Palace in 2024, which contains photographs and essays about the palaces of Seoul.

In his earlier work The Windows Series, Baek—often referred to as the “photographer of the window”—explored his own life through images framed by both physical perspectives and visual aesthetics, often set within a hotel. His windows project layered images of life, combining foreground and background, while presenting diverse scenes of a hotel through a lens of awareness that goes beyond the universal view.

Baek was deeply influenced by John Pfahl, a conceptual photographer and landscape artist. Baek reinterprets Pfahl’s perspective, stating:

“All photos begin and end with a window. As in life, there can be no image without a window and no reason without a window. A window is a mirror, and vice versa. My Pictured Windows are mirrors I encountered through windows. They are the illusions, perceptions, and eternal sense of life I have witnessed through them. They are the mirrors of the mind I must care for forever—the very frames of my life.”

“From the Window” – Dialog Box reveals both the gap in understanding and the emergence of new understanding about the photographer’s own life. Today, countless windows appear in photographs, yet some hold significance beyond their universal meaning. For Baek, the window is not simply a visual opening but a symbolic frame—especially the window of a hotel. These hotel windows embody physical sight and visible aesthetics, but also lead to awareness that transcends both visual and universal perception. To him, a window is a mirror, a frame of life, and a place where foreground and background merge.

A hotel is often situated where the view is exceptional. Guests seek such views, desire them, and often choose rooms accordingly. The hotel window thus becomes both the landscape of desire and a symbol of modernity. It holds the illusion of reality and the reality of illusion simultaneously. It is also a place of profound darkness—because the deeper the darkness, the deeper the illusion, and the clearer the mirror of the self it reflects.

Today, the hotel can be seen as a place where the real world constantly transforms into a world of fantasy, much like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Realization exists in the tension between reality and illusion, and the hotel window is the boundary between the two. For someone who stakes his life’s work on windows, the window itself becomes a reflection of his identity. It is why photographer Seungwoo Baek photographs windows—and why these photographs exist.

Seungwoo Baek

“From the window" Dialog box

Selected Solo Exhibition

Selected Group Exhibition

Collection

‌Publication