Ahn Jinkyun, Hada Contemporary

South Korean artist Ahn Jinkyun opens up questions about photography and family with his unique show at Hada Contemporary

The backstory…

It was not so many years ago that Bethnal Green's Vyner Street was the thrillingly vibrant epicentre of East London's young art scene; its galleries' coordinated opening parties drawing huge crowds on Thursday evenings. But the hipster party wave has now more or less moved on and the galleries that have remained survive on the strength of their exhibition programmes.

Vyner Street's popularity coincided with the mid 2000s upswell of interest in Korean art. So it is fitting that one of the galleries that still makes the street worth visiting is Hada Contemporary, which specialises in East Asian art, with a particular focus on work from South Korea.

The exhibition…

Young RCA Graduate, Ahn Jinkyun, creates images in which the technology of the photographic process is used as an extended metaphor for genealogical inheritance. The show is called Three Faces, Two Places, One Device and promises to be really quite an unselfconsciously cheerful celebration of familial relations.

Ahn is a member of the youngest generation to remember a time before social media, but also one that grew up with this technology and the constant sharing of images that it has brought fourth. This makes for an ambivalent relationship between the artist and his medium. Ahn eschews excessive theorising about the deceptive qualities of the photograph; in his work, collections of photographs represent straightforward accumulations of personal histories. But, Ahn seems to suggest, personal histories are rendered moot without the constant presence of the camera. Superficially Ahn's images are polished and stylish, yet there is perhaps a hint of something deeper and more thoughtful beyond the artifice