Not surprisingly, the image chosen to promote "Bohnchang Koo: Masterworks of Korean Photography" is a sewn together photographic collage of a male nude. This picture clearly refers to the mix-and-match photographic technique of the Starn Twins whose career took off in Boston.

In the '80s, it was commonplace for painters to lift imagery. In post modernist terms it was called "appropriating imagery" from pictures throughout art history. The Starn Twins used a camera to swipe visuals. What distinguished their work, though, is not just that they photographed other artists' works, but they also fragmented them into a number of photographs, which were crumpled, stained, scratched, and pasted together with Scotch-tape or pinned directly to the wall in what looked like a casual manner. In their hands, photography became a unique hand-made object, a hybrid work at a time when artistic media were still assigned to such discrete categories as painting, sculpture, and photography.

Bohnchang Koo, White, 2000. View more images

Comparing the photography of Bohnchang Koo with that of Starn Twins, however, is not altogether fair. This show asserts the importance and power of Koo's own distinctive trajectory. For many artists in the '80s, the collage format, whether layered, painted images or the actual collaging of materials, suggested a way out of modern art's apparent dead-end. In part, the idea was that everything that could be done had been done, so why not create something new by recombining old images?

Paintings by American artists like David Salle reveled in the hodge-podge glut of images cluttering our visual landscape. Works by artists like Sigmar Polke took a sardonic stab at consumer culture by way of sly images full of visual conceits. Koo had a slightly different idea. Yes, he is drawn to the use of collage and layered imagery, but his aim is to re-humanize art, not to create a hermetic end game that shuffles and reshuffles references to other imagery.

Instead, in Koo's words, his work "for a long time has expressed a history of certain living things and their decay and disappearance. I was reminded of a saying they have in India that what we call the world is an accumulation of dust. I wonder how many stories the almost invisible traces of dust can tell us? I am very interested in the scars and the traces made by time or experience."

The series "White" depicts small flecks of gray and black against an almost uniform white field, reminiscent of Agnes Martin's barely visible lines on white canvas. On closer examination, Koo's thin points, however, turn out to be tiny branches trapped in snow.

Bohnchang Koo, In the Beginning, 1991. View more images

Other pictures, such as those in the series "Snow," with their fields of stones or grass shot from above, bring to mind minimalism's use of essential forms. Of these photos, Koo explains that he "wanted to photograph that moment when snow on top of the ground or grass begins to melt and disappears."

These pieces reveal more than Koo's post-modern aims. Without a horizon line, they seem infinite. The small objects depicted -- flecks of snow, a few uncovered stones -- are poignant when placed in large fields. A sense of impending change, and with that, loss, permeates the work.

The idealized bodies of Koo's Starn Twin-like collages contain a similar emotional resonance. He crops out or covers the heads of his male subjects in the series "In the Beginning." The photographs draw their expression from the figures' controlled poses of anguish, brilliantly frustrating the works' erotic undertones.

Similarly, by piecing the photos together with stitching, Koo undermines the viewer's ability to make sense of their forms all at once. Instead, one must slowly navigate the image. In this way, Koo uses black and white film to capture every undulation of his models' beautiful flesh, but then thwarts the pleasure of that sensuality, which creates a tense psychological energy.

Eschewing empty formalism in favor of a terse approach to emotion, most of Koo's work revolves around highly charged poetic images. Using evocative objects, such as an old pocket watch, photographed with precision against an ocean in "Breath #1," Koo resuscitates the Surrealist's idea of the marvelous as the surprising.

But he clearly does so on his own terms: he forces us to take Surrealism's irrational juxtapositions in the guise of a minimalist format and a post-modernist mindset. His exquisite, spare images become snapshots of what at first appear to be chance encounters, but in reality are controlled constructs, rendered with such conviction as to propel us to suspend our disbelief.

Bohnchang Koo, Good-Bye Paradise (Box), 1993. View more images

Like the surrealist Rene Magritte's, Koo's photographs traffic in situations that, like the images in the series "White," at first suggest one thing but, by looking more closely, reveal something else.

A similar situation exists in another series, "Good-Bye Paradise (Box)." Photograms of butterflies and bugs are pinned inside wooden cases, with glass fronts like specimen boxes in a natural history museum. The images of the insects are black and white on rice paper. We are confronted with ghosts of the creatures, their traces transferred to photosensitized paper.

In the boxes, the insects' images -- and by extension all photographic images -- are revealed to be just one more doomed attempt to stop time, to keep a moment, thing or creature in a fixed state, even though, rationally, we know it's impossible to arrest time. Instead, like all of Koo's best work, we're left with the beautiful futility of trying to hold onto something dear, even if it's just the ashes of life itself.

The "Bohnchang Koo: Masterworks of Korean Photography" exhibit is on display through February 18, 2003 at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA.

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