Kang Jaegu’s Disarming _ Park Chan-kyong Artist

1. The Armistice Society

Soldiers have become visible in ways that would once have been unimaginable. Today, it is commonplace for them to post photographs of themselves on social media, while military institutions actively maintain their own official accounts. Yet what is made visible is carefully selective: the soldier’s ‘spirited’ daily life, patriotic narratives, and military competence are prominently displayed, while almost everything else remains excluded.

Contemporary warfare demonstrates that the controlled circulation of images has become an essential component of war itself. Warfare and its representation can no longer be separated. Drone operator’s monitors, thermal imagery from missiles, and satellite photographs now circulate as the ‘reality’ of war. Soldiers and military institutions are deliberately exposed to public view, yet the battlefield itself has become less visible than ever before. Violence remains, but the bodies upon which that violence is inflicted disappear, rendering violence increasingly abstract.

As warfare becomes visible in real time through personal media and strategic image management, it simultaneously erases the sense that actual human bodies inhabit those spaces. Put simply, the soldier’s body, as that of a vulnerable individual, has become increasingly difficult to see. Although this transformation takes on a distinctive form in places such as the Korean Peninsula, where an armistice persists, it is also becoming an increasingly universal condition of contemporary warfare.

Everyone knows that North and South Korea remain, in legal terms, under an armistice rather than a peace treaty. Yet how many people in South Korea genuinely feel that the Korean Peninsula is still technically at war, merely suspended between battles? The Korean War has become so prolonged in its ceasefire that it is often described as the world’s longestrunning armistice, making the reality of war feel increasingly distant.

In recent years, large-scale military clashes between the two Koreas have become rare, and even the atmosphere of the Cold War has begun to fade. Contemporary Korean photography reflects this shift in the way it represents soldiers. Rather than focusing primarily on the tensions of war and the Cold War, along with the discipline imposed by the state and military institutions, recent works increasingly turn their attention toward the individual soldier, everyday life, and military culture.1)

Kang Jaegu’s photographs occupy both directions at once. While acknowledging the enduring tension of a divided nation, his portraits quietly observe the temporal condition of what might be called a ‘prolonged armistice.’

Military life under South Korea’s long armistice has normalized a fracture between the powerful collectivity of ‘the military’ and the individuality of the soldier, as well as between military identity and the ordinary life of a young man. Under the country’s conscription system, this fracture also marks the distance between the obligation of military service and personal freedom. In particular, the loosened uniforms, long hair, slippers, and canvas tote bags that appear throughout The Reservist reveal the formalized obligations of an ‘armistice society’ exactly as they are. Photographs of the same individuals taken years apart likewise allow us to perceive the contrast between tension and release, between being a soldier and becoming something less defined by military identity.

While the figures in The Reservist resemble civilians who simply happen to be wearing military uniforms, Kang Jaegu’s earlier series A Private portrays young soldiers whose rigid bearing and exhausted expressions evoke the hardships of barracks life. (A PRIVATE #02, reproduced on page 20 of this book, is a representative example.) Although the pressure and tension of war are scarcely perceptible in everyday life south of Seoul, they remain concentrated in certain bodies. Among them, the private—the lowest enlisted rank—bears that burden most intensely. The anxiety experienced by recruits and privates recalls the way phylogeny is said to be recapitulated through ontogeny, as though the seventy-six years between 1950 and 2026 had been compressed into eighteen months of military service.

If the private stands at the threshold of war, the relaxed appearance of the reservist reflects the current condition of relations between North and South Korea. Seen in the best light, it suggests peace; seen differently, it reflects a society that has forgotten war.

Kang Jaegu’s photographs are concerned not only with the changing temporality experienced by individual soldiers, but also with the distinctive relationship between the military and Korean society under a prolonged armistice. The 12mm series, in particular, reveals that the complex relationship between the nation-state and young Korean men is not borne by soldiers alone but is shared across society as a whole. One of the defining characteristics of South Korea’s conscription system is that military service has been ritualized as a social rite of passage, functioning much like a collective coming-of-age ceremony.

Because the overwhelming majority of Korean men serve in the military, enlistment, family visits, leave, and discharge are experienced not only by the soldier but also by families, partners, and friends. In this sense, military service in Korea is not a hidden or exceptional experience but an integral part of everyday social life and conversation.

Whereas in countries with volunteer military systems, soldiers constitute only a small proportion of the population and military experience remains largely separate from civilian life, in South Korea, military service can be understood as a form of embodied social memory dispersed throughout society.

For this reason, the 12mm series takes on the form of family portraits or commemorative photographs. Just as a wedding portrait records the formation of a new family, the photographs taken immediately before enlistment document a young man’s social ties just before he departs from civilian life. These images do more than preserve memories of someone about to enter military service; they also affirm the relationships that will endure during his absence. Through the figure who is about to disappear from everyday life, they paradoxically reinforce social solidarity. In South Korea’s prolonged armistice, the military serves not only as a force of separation but also, paradoxically, as a means of connection.

This dynamic is expressed most vividly in 12mm #7-1 (p. 154). A young man about to leave for military service stands in the foreground, while behind him his friends play piggyback as they might have done in childhood. In the distance, active-duty soldiers walk between the playful friends and the soon-tobe recruit, dividing the scene and making its quiet absurdity even more striking. This peculiar vitality recurs throughout many works in the 12mm series. It is, perhaps, the vitality of simply being together. The unfamiliar moment of sending a friend or lover off to military service is revealed unembellished beneath the camera’s flash, while that same flash also functions like a small firework, celebrating the sudden solidarity that the moment itself creates. In 12mm, Kang Jaegu ultimately explores photography as a form of social glue, one that acquires a distinctive significance in Korean society through the institution of compulsory military service.

2. Disarmament

According to Kang Jaegu, the series 12mm and Eve of Enlistment reveal the tension carried by young men on the threshold of military service. As he writes, “On the eve of enlistment, after having his long hair cut, a young man stands naked before the camera under the lights of a studio. In that instant, the time he has lived through, the environment to which he belongs, and his anxiety about the future suddenly surface and become visible on the photographic plane.”2) Kang explains that these photographs attempt to register the fear of intensive military training, communal life, rigid hierarchy, the loss of personal freedom, and the anxiety of separation from family, lovers, and friends.

Whether these emotions are actually expressed in the photographs, however, or whether viewers simply choose to read them in this way, ultimately remains an open question. More important is why such anxiety deserves our attention in the first place. Imagine, for a moment, someone who fully accepts the necessity of military service, is ideologically committed to its purpose, and even wishes to enlist. Even if fear or anxiety existed, it would be unlikely to reveal itself so readily. From this perspective, fear may be understood as the psychological trace of an involuntary consent to compulsory military service.To recognize anxiety in these photographs, then, is also to glimpse the point at which the institution of conscription begins to fracture from within. What comes into view is the peculiar temporality of a war endlessly postponed—and, with it, a peace that can never fully arrive.

This discussion of emotion and its representation helps explain why Kang Jaegu remains committed to the portrait. Traditionally, portraiture has rested on the belief that a person’s inner life can be revealed through outward appearance. That belief has long since collapsed—or at the very least, it can no longer be taken for granted. This is not only because philosophy has questioned the existence of a unified and stable subject, but because contemporary life more often teaches us the opposite: appearances continually generate assumptions about interiority rather than disclose it. The endless circulation of selfies and portrait photographs on social media offers perhaps the clearest evidence of this condition.

If portraiture continues to matter in Kang Jaegu’s work, it is not because it reveals psychology but because it exposes the ambiguity of psychological experience itself. Fear and anxiety coexist with resignation, acceptance, ignorance, endurance, and resolve. What emerges is not a single emotional state but a constellation of affects that resists definitive interpretation. Rather than discovering fear or anxiety as identifiable psychological realities, we encounter something that seems to invite such readings while simultaneously withholding them. The portrait becomes a space in which interpretation is deliberately suspended.

That ambiguity is precisely what gives these works their critical force. Their indeterminacy gradually unsettles, at its very foundations, the mechanistic logic, coercive authority, and collective identity through which the military functions as an institution of the state. By stripping away background and context, Kang Jaegu’s portraits direct our attention entirely toward the minute details of the human body. Yet no matter how closely we examine a face, a patch of skin, or the trace of a vein, we never arrive at the point where the machinery of the state begins, nor can we locate the place where “the soldier” ultimately resides.

The rhetoric of portraiture reaches its fullest expression in Eve of Enlistment. The background is entirely erased, leaving each figure posed upon a small pedestal. The nude young men assume postures that evoke the female nude as it has traditionally appeared in the history of art and in formalist photography, although as in Eve of Enlistment (p. 112 of this book), even this reference remains deliberately elusive. The ambiguity discussed earlier thus extends to the realm of sexuality. This is not an ambiguity of gender, but rather the result of photographs that deliberately suppress almost every conventional sexual code, leaving little room for the familiar stereotypes that typically shape our perception of the male soldier.

The pedestal on which each figure sits is one of the work’s most significant devices. It lends the body the appearance of sculpture, yet because the figure is unmistakably a living body rather than carved stone, the pedestal seems conspicuously narrow and uncomfortable. While it recalls the conventions of the nude in art history, it simultaneously undermines the monumentality traditionally associated with the naked body. Nudity here is not presented as a proud body with nothing to conceal. Judged according to the conventions of classical nude aesthetics, it is “a body with little to look at, yet one we have never truly seen before.”

Through this descent into an unfamiliar kind of ordinariness, we encounter the flesh and skin that constitute an individual, the immediacy of embodied existence, and the vulnerability that belongs not only to these young men but to every human being. Even though these photographs are organized under the category of the “soldier,” each portrait ultimately resists the instrumental gaze of classification itself.

The flesh, skin, and body hair of each individual already constitute a site where classification begins to break down. What, then, remains at the end of this process of disarmament, after the military has been stripped away, after weapons and uniforms have disappeared, and finally after even everyday clothing has been removed? Does what remains reveal an essential truth, an unmasked self concealed beneath every layer?

Contrary to such expectations, the nude bodies in Eve of Enlistment lead us back to the most fundamental question of identity. As these photographs suggest, what we call the “individual,” as opposed to the collective, is simply the condition in which nothing remains to be stripped away. Once there is nothing left to remove, the very ground on which identity rests begins to give way. We find ourselves in a state that precedes every category—before distinctions such as “young man,” “male,” “patriot,” or “private”—until all that remains is the tautological recognition that this person is simply this person.

This paradox lies at the heart of the work. We do not strip away the veil of clothing in order to arrive at the truth of the naked body. Rather, the naked body itself becomes another veil. It is a garment more powerful than the military uniform or even the weapon, and one that can never finally be removed. It is what we call the individual. In this sense, the soldier’s naked body becomes the ultimate camouflage. From the body alone, we can never know who he is. It stands in perfect inversion to military camouflage, whose patterned surface paradoxically renders the soldier even more conspicuous within the city.

3. Bodies That Can Be Encountered

Kang Jaegu’s photographs of soldiers eliminate far more than training grounds, barracks, weapons, and military uniforms. They also strip away the dynamism of charging, marching, and striking. This is precisely why he turns to the seemingly old-fashioned form of the portrait. Its apparent traditionality gives it the critical force to challenge contemporary representations of soldiers and war. Rather than amplifying the excessive dynamism of soldiers and weapons or the instantaneous spectacle of explosions and flashes, portraiture restores them to a slower, quieter, and more sustained experience of time.

The time spent in the presence of a soldier’s portrait differs fundamentally from the instant in which a coordinate is fixed or the split second in which an algorithm identifies a target through visual pattern recognition. Consider how satellite surveillance and the computational speed of artificial intelligence have become indispensable technologies of contemporary warfare. Likewise, films and television dramas about war or military life are almost unimaginable without rapid editing, visceral close-ups, and bodies marked by blood, sweat, and exhaustion. Such images are designed to overwhelm the retina through their speed and intensity.

Kang Jaegu’s soldiers, standing or sitting motionless for extended periods before a camera fixed on a tripod, do not simply present themselves to be seen. They remain there long enough for an encounter to take place.

To encounter a human body, especially one that looks directly back at us or, at times, stands before us unclothed, is fundamentally different from observing a subject at a distance or designating a target on a screen. It is an encounter that calls forth the viewer’s own bodily awareness rather than the detached perception of remote observation. Although this experience still unfolds through the act of looking at a photograph, our gaze never remains fixed. It pauses, wanders, moves closer, then quietly withdraws, much as it does when we meet a stranger for the first time, moving continually between detail and whole, expression and meaning, desire and vulnerability.

Perhaps looking at a photograph is a process in which our vision repeatedly zooms in and out, not only optically but psychologically. In the course of that movement, our focus inevitably falters. It is precisely at that moment of uncertainty that the presence of another person begins to emerge. Within this psychologically low-resolution space, we are able, however briefly, to step away from the relentless propulsion of media and encounter another human being face to face.

In 12mm and Eve of Enlistment, Kang Jaegu photographed the same individuals over intervals of several months, and sometimes even several years. What we compare are only the finished images, while the real transformation unfolds within the invisible time that separates one photograph from the next. That interval is an out-of-focus space, a duration of change that photography can never fully grasp. In works such as Portrait Shot, even the photograph itself has been cut away, leaving behind a space of near-zero resolution where it is impossible to know who once stood there.

What, then, is the temporality of an armistice society? And what is the temporality of photography? In an age when satellite imaging and weapons systems continue to evolve at remarkable speed, cameras and memory chips have become essential technologies for identifying targets and producing coordinates. Yet Kang Jaegu, who once served as a military photographer, turns these same technologies toward an entirely different purpose. His high-resolution photographs reverse the logic of visual systems that distance the body and reduce it to abstraction.

The meticulous rendering of skin, veins, and facial expression does not confine a person to the precision of a coordinate. Instead, it expands the possibility of presence, making genuine encounter possible. This is why Kang Jaegu returns to the seemingly outdated tradition of portraiture, and why he seeks to reclaim its critical potential today.


1) For example, the soldiers portrayed in Oh Hyung-geun’s < The Middleman series (2012)>are unmistakably real soldiers, yet they also possess the presence of fashion models. Put differently, the cultural codes that define the figure of the soldier, such as uniform, posture, and setting, are meticulously orchestrated within the image. They are undeniably soldiers, but they also appear as ‘cultural’ figures performing the role of the soldier. A comparison with Lee Han-gu’s < Military Use (1989)> makes this shift immediately apparent. The emphasis moves away from representing the tensions of war and the Cold War, as well as the discipline imposed by the nation and the military collective, toward the individual soldier, everyday life, and military culture.

2) From Kang Jaegu’s master’s thesis, A Study on the Male Nude Portrait: Focusing on the Work The Night Before Enlistment, Graduate School of Chung-Ang University, 2022, p. 21.