Willem van den Hoed met his future wife during his first photography project in South Korea in 2011. Two years later he relocated to Seoul. The typical Korean Hyundai apartment in which they lived for four years became a kind of cultural camera obscura. Kimchi Beach is a personal account of daily life in the dynamic metropolis and as such offers a unique insight into the way in which Van den Hoed’s artworks are created.

‘With its short, almost dreamy sketches of life within the eleventh largest economy in the world, Kimchi Beach is a fascinating and original description of how artist and photographer Willem van den Hoed tries to settle in the South Korean metropolis of Seoul. The personal quest, combined with poignant observations about Korean culture and society, make this one of the most interesting Dutch-language works about modern-day South Korea.’
Jeroen Visser, South Korean correspondent for the Volkskrant.

2019

Lecturis Publishers
Paperback € 18,50

Willem van den Hoed (1965) uses his keen eye to register images of special places all over the world. Rooms, buildings, cities. I like situations that have ben crated by human hand. Constructions, parallel lines, reflections, coherent shadows and reliable vanishing points. In the cities I pass through and stay a while, a hotel room becomes a shelter, a cocoon.’ The temporary space feels like a challenging laboratory to him. It is a kind of crow’s nest, from which he observes the world. The most prominent theme in Van den Hoed’s work is the study of the contrast between the intimate ambience of a hotel room and the public exterior. The glass that divides these worlds plays a crucial role in this process.

For Van den Hoed, photography is the most important medium for creating a new, layered reality. This reality, in which his background as an architect is always apparent, does not appear to be manipulated, but every millimetre of the photo has been edited. The representation of the city, the buildings and the interior is accurate; the light on the other hand comes from hundreds of suns.

Authors: Frank van de Schoor en Pim Hoff

2018

Lecturis Publishers
Hardcover € 33,50

Cahier that was published by Galerie de Zaal and Willem van den Hoed for the exhibition with the same title at Galerie de Zaal in Delft

2011

€ 10,00

In none of the hotel rooms are people to be seen. One has the impression that the guests have deserted the rooms. Van den Hoed, however, has stayed behind and taken his photographs. His work does not merely show us empty rooms. On the contrary, the rooms are filled with movement: the way in which light moves over the course of time; the changes in the views of the cities; the reflections in the glass, mirrors and other reflective surfaces, and the varying intensity of the light. By observing, as an ‘invisible man’, an apparently empty room over a long period and then bringing together these observations in a single work, Van den Hoed creates a new, layered reality. A reality that invites us to enter the room and stand next to the photographer. That is, if that place has not already been taken by Haruki Murakami, the Japanese writer who, in his novel ‘After Dark’, so accurately describes the events in a deserted and apparently empty room:

She hangs the bag on her shoulder and walks out of the restroom. The door closes.

Our viewpoint camera lingers in here for a while, observing the restroom. Mari is no longer here. Neither is anyone else. Music continues to play from the ceiling speaker. A Hall and Oates song now: “I Can’t Go for That.” A closer look reveals that Mari’s image is still reflected in the mirror over the sink. The Mari in the mirror is looking from her side into this side. Her sombre gaze seems to be expecting some kind of occurrence. But there is no one on this side. Only her image is left in the Skylark’s restroom mirror.

The room begins to darken. In the deepening darkness, “I Can’t Go for That” continues to play.

(from the essay ‘Apparently Empty’ by Hugo Beschoor Plug)

2009

Galerie de Zaal
Hardcover € 15,00 / € 45,00 (1 + 3 numbered Limited Editions)