Just like clockwork: Metal artist embraces analog beauty of the cogwheel

Metal artist Hyun Kwang-hun focuses on assembling watch parts at his studio located in Huam-dong, Yongsan District, central Seoul. [PARK SANG-MOON]

A wall clock with its dial designed in hangul, the Korean alphabet [PARK SANG-MOON]

 
Cogwheels tick and rattle as they engage. The sound of the toothed wheels makes people reminisce about the good old days.  
 
Artist Hyun Kwang-hun creates art with metal pieces. The 42-year-old metal artist is involved in the A to Z of watchmaking and even produces a tiny screw as small as 0.6 millimeters by himself. He also makes handmade film cameras under the brand name Heartbeat, which is embedded with a watch movement, the engine that makes analog watches work.
 
Hyun purposely displays watch gears and mechanisms that work wristwatches, table clocks and wall clocks. By doing so, he lets people see how cogwheels organically engage so that they can indulge in the beauty of the metal parts. In some of his works, metal cogwheels meet the shapes of traditional Korean windows and doors found in wooden lattice frames, creating an art piece that contains elements from both the present and past.    
 
A handmade film camera made by Hyun is compact enough to fit in one hand. Since the camera reveals its inner workings, it adds an analog touch to the gadget.  

Hyun works on a pinhole camera [PARK SANG-MOON]

 
Growing up, Hyun dreamed of becoming a scientist. He loved to assemble and disassemble anything in his hands. Once, the little boy made a radio by himself. He loved drawing, too. However, he chose metal sculpture when he entered college.
 
Hyun happened to make a pinhole camera when he was in college and has continued to do so since then.  
 
He needed to understand how cameras work. After taking numerous cameras apart, he got a good grip on how the devices work.  
 
What sets his pinhole cameras apart from similar sorts is that they reveal their inner mechanism. He did that to show users how camera parts function.  
 
Hyun pondered ways to improve his pinhole camera and stumbled upon the idea of incorporating the watch movement into it.  
 
Before, he had to manually open and close the shutters of his camera, making it difficult to get the exposure right. He needed a function that could automatically close the shutter. Around that time, he coincidentally watched a documentary about watch experts in Switzerland. From the masters who made the watch movement, Hyun was inspired to install a watch movement instead of an electric device in his camera.  
 
It took him two years to study the watch movement. Hyun watched documentaries produced in Switzerland and Germany and taught himself all the procedures of making the technology that runs watches.  
 
Some of the vital machinery needed for watch movements was unavailable in Korea, so Hyun directly purchased them from overseas websites.

Hyun’s art studio is filled with various metal parts and tools [PARK SANG-MOON]

 

Metal artist Hyun Kwang-hun focuses on assembling watch parts at his studio located in Huam-dong, Yongsan District, central Seoul. [PARK SANG-MOON]

The last stage is the most challenging when making a watch or a camera. When a particular product is done, Hyun checks whether his creation works properly. Once it does, he begins disassembling it to review each part and reassembles it. It is a grueling and tedious procedure.  
 
Hyun is one of about 100 watch masters in the world. He designs watches and produces all the essential parts himself.  
 
The artist doesn’t produce watches and cameras for commercial purposes. He believes his role is to study and create more creative artwork. Living in the era of artificial intelligence, Hyun thinks we need to value small things such as cogwheels.  

A handmade pinhole camera (95x66x33mm) is part of the Heartbeat series of Hyun [PARK SANG-MOON]

A handmade pinhole camera (95x66x33mm) is part of the Heartbeat series of Hyun [PARK SANG-MOON]

BY PARK SANG-MOON [park.sangmun@joongang.co.kr]