Critiques

The Flâneur; A Stroll through the City

‘Flâneur’ is a French word meaning the person who walks the street idly. With a huge project to develop the city in the mid-19th century, Paris underwent substantial changes. Old appearance of the city in the Middle Age had gone and high buildings, wide roads, classy cafés, restaurants, and theaters came. As the entire city changed in its appearance, the livelihood of the people also changed and their lives started to undergo unfamiliar changes. The people who witnessed this phenomenon in changing Paris were called ‘Flâneur’, a person who takes a stroll, Charles Baudelaire who lived from 1821 to 1868 said. The city was not the space for people to live but just the landscape as the subject people looked at. The people who lived there became the spectators who took a contemplative view on the urban landscape changing while being separated from their lives. The work of Kim Hong Shik is to start observing and recording the change and movement modern cities undergo as this era’s ‘Flâneur’ and to study and understand the city as the place our modernity is realized.

2011