Yeondoo Jung: Dreams Come True

Transgressing the Border Between Reality and Fantasy

"Dreams Come True," a project that converts children's drawings into reality:

Yeondoo Jung transforms photography into a magical wand that, with the wave of his hand, casts a magic spell. His photos recreate the dreams of adolescents that he has met in cities around the world. His own world is made up of children's fantasies scribbled on drawing paper -- not a world of reality, but of faded dreams. His photosare careful, imaginative re-creations that bring to life the fragmented stories of people that come his way and tickle his ear and eye.

In a series of tightly composed photos that began in 2001, Jung does much more than record a visual image. He discourses with the subject. The multiple layers of experience and verbal exchange in the space shared by the photographer who peers through his lens and the subject that stares back at him create a unique photographic image. Jung painstakingly gives photographic form to disembodied dreams, inspiring our sense of wonder and respect for his representation of the terrible freedom of a child's unbridled ideas or the nascent power of an adolescent's dreams. The impenetrable borders and the fusion points between reality and fantasy converge smoothly in Jung's photos, inviting us into a new visual world of emotion and desire.