"Girls in makeup": How Korean schoolgirls are painted

EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week is the “Cosmetic Girls” series of Korean photographer Oh Hyun Kun, who photographed more than a hundred made-up Korean teenage girls to show how pop culture influences their notions of beauty.

Initially, I was going to become a film director, and I was not at all interested in photography. I think I was attracted by the complexity and multistage of the film process. As a start, I began to study photography and, paradoxically, gradually became involved: the simplicity and minimalism of a photographic image fascinated me. Perhaps most of all I was attracted by the abstract nature of photography and its openness to interpretation. I studied commercial photography at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara in the mid-80s, then served two years in the Korean army, and then returned to the States to continue my education in art photography and cinematography.

In modern Korea, the entire entertainment industry, including music, film and fashion, is highly oriented towards the tastes of teenage girls. On the reverse side, a huge number of young girls comprehend the basics of femininity from pop culture - first of all, the style of dress, makeup, hairstyles. This affects their behavior, their perception and the formation of their personality - so today in Korea, in fact, the era of girlhood. These adolescents are revolting against traditions that prohibit makeup, but at the same time obey the dictates of a new mass-cultural code and modern stereotypes about female beauty prevalent in their environment. In this series of portraits, I wanted to show the main ideas and clichés about the appearance that were formed in adolescent girls thanks to modern Korean pop culture and mass media.

As art critic Puck Ji Sok put it, “girls are both subject and object of desire.” I am attracted to the idea of maiden duality in modern Korean society, and I try to reflect this in my works. I would like to convey in these portraits of girls the subconscious ambiguity, the ambiguity of their position and bring the viewer out of the comfort zone.

Despite the fact that all these portraits are close-ups of heroines, besides of large size, I tried to de-personalize the portrait genre as much as possible and instead create a distance and stressfully emphasize physical similarities within one social group. Extremely detailed and vivid shooting made up girls - in fact, an invitation for the viewer to take a deeper look at the facade of trimmed bangs, colored lenses, dyed hair and makeup. I shot them on different, but repetitive monochromatic bright backgrounds to emphasize the limits of their individuality and to pull out their vulnerability.

For this project, I conducted street-casting, a total of 518 girls offered to play, and 138 of them responded. For me it was important to emphasize the feeling of community between them, so I asked all of them to play in the same pose and with the same facial expression. Of course, when they came to the studio, many of them felt awkward or uncertain: most of them were ordinary girls who had never posed for a professional photographer in their lives. I like that this feeling of tension and discomfort worked for the good of the project - I wanted to achieve indifference to the sociological research, in which there is no place for relaxation and liberation.

To describe the girls' childhood and femininity, photo critic Anne Beatty uses the term "ambivalence". I started the project with the same thought in my mind. However, as the project progressed, I realized that this ambivalence is more connected with the fine line between the girl and the woman than between the child and the adult. As a result, the project resulted in the study of the trait that separates the girl's view of things and the first symptoms of awakening femininity appearing in postures and gestures. In this way, I tried to capture the emotional instability of adolescent girls who are in a transitional period of their lives.