Red wine and doughnuts at the Daegu Photo Biennale, South Korea

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/photography-blog/2012/oct/29/daegu-photo-biennale-south-korea

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Red wine and ring doughnuts: it's not your average combination of drink and canapé to toast the opening night of a photography exhibition. But as I quickly realised during my visit to the 2012 Daegu Photo Biennale in South Korea, things are somewhat extraordinary over there. I had travelled 6,000 miles to be at the Young International Photographers' Exhibition, one of the many shows forming this year's Biennale, where my distorted image of a London street scene hung on a wall opposite the mound of glazed confectionery. It was a fitting start to what proved a curious and inspiring Biennale.

The 2012 festival encapsulated the current thirst for photography in the Korean peninsula – it was a celebration of the allure and potency of the medium in all its guises. Unorthodox works in the main exhibition, Photography is Magic, provided a neat focal point that challenged typical notions of image creation. The juxtaposition of Sebastiaan Bremer's colour-splashed vistas with Charlotte Dumas's disquieting portraits of animals forged a powerful bond between two entirely different styles of photography.

The Youth Code was another vibrant show. Adolescence was documented and subverted through stand-out works by Ryan McGinley, Willem Popelier, Viviane Sassen and Anouk Kruithof. McGinley's images of festival revellers – wild, colourful and rapturous – contained a sense of abandonment in stark contrast to the traditional Korean photography on show elsewhere. Proof of Existence & Proof of Absence, for example, chronicled 20th century Korean portraiture. Each monochrome image, with its rigid composition, traced memories of people and times past. You could almost hear the photographer calling "hana, dul, set" before pressing the shutter and capturing each precise moment for posterity.

The current band of young Korean photographers, meanwhile, are unshackled and strikingly creative. Their works, many of which were exhibited at the Young International Photographers' Exhibition, were self-assured and full of character. Lee Bae-Geun's painterly creations drew photography out from two to three dimensions, while the piercing stares within Han Gee-Hyeon's series Face to Face were unavoidably engaging; even from 30 metres away I felt like I had to view them before anything else.

The show also featured the works of an array of young photographers located around the world. From Marta Kochanek's emotive self-portraits to Michael Gaillard's abstract images (which recalled Laszlo Moholy Nagy's experiments with photograms); it was a diverse crop and a snapshot of a generation evidently at ease with photography as an art form. My piece (you did ask, right?!) was a fluid, yet warped image of people rushing through London which I created with a single roll of 35mm film using a modified analogue camera. It was my attempt to criticise Zeno's paradoxes of motion, and display the pace of life around me – a sensation evident throughout both Korea and the Biennale.