Hans Gindlesberger

Hans Gindlesberger is a contemporary artist currently based in Virginia. His work examines how contemporary society constructs and represents concepts of place, where the photographic image plays a central role. Gindlesberger’s projects engage a range of photographic traditions and thinking in exploring our psychological relationship to simulated and actual places. Today we share Weighing the Rain, a photographic series that looks at the evolving landscape and social structure of Korea through the lens of the monsoon season.

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Weighing the Rain

Photographed during Korea’s monsoon season, evokes the weather phenomenon as a signifier of the tempestuous social landscape of the country and the pressures exerted on the individual in its collective society.

The travelogue establishes a sense of place by looking at the urban environment, natural landscape, and social exchanges. The photographs turn their attention to the confluence of past and present, the scale and density of the urban environment, people moving with the flow of the city, and poetic moments of everyday life that quietly suggest sentiments of desire, struggle, and tranquility. The project contemplates the complexity of Korea’s social landscape and searches for contradictions; in the impact of Korea’s rapid ascent as an economic force, the rigidity of social hierarchies and the intensity of their obligations, the relentless development of the urban environment, a need to preserve tradition, the immersion in materialistic culture, and the unique ideology of a collective society. The photographs in Weighing the Rain seek to use the visual language of photography to describe a physical and psychological relationship to place.

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Since earning his MFA in Photography from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2006, his projects in photo, video, and installation have been exhibited widely, including Galleri Image (Aarhus, Denmark), Gallery 44 (Toronto), Jen Bekman Projects (New York), Voies Off Photography Festival (Arles, France), and the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) (Albuquerque), among others. In 2009, the New York Foundation for the Arts awarded him a fellowship in photography and in 2011, he received a Mary L. Nohl Fellowship from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. Currently, Gindlesberger is Assistant Professor of Digital Imaging in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech, a leading program in the intersection of arts and technology.

To view more Han’s work please visit his website.