The Jeoung Jae Choul: For Love and Peace exhibition presents a retrospective show on artist Jeoung Jae Choul (1959 – 2020) in celebration of his one-year memorial. It outlines his participatory projects, all of which were held in many different places through the utilization of mobility. It reconstructs his on-site actions—which formed his ‘documented and collected’ artworks—and it attempts to follow his artistic practices.

Jeoung was awarded the Grand Prize at Grand-Prix Exhibition of Jung-Ang Daily News in 1988. It was in this time that he began to make his mark as a sculptor. In 1995, he participated in an international residency via an academic exchange workshop with Kunstakademie Düsseldorf through the university where he’d given a lecture. Motivated by the globalization that the Korean art scene was undergoing, he explored a conceptual and performative visual art language through traveling and migration beginning in the 2000s. This exhibition marks his post-2000s turning point, in terms of both his attitude and his methodology as an artist. Through his introduction of site-focused works such as Silk Road Project (2004–2011) and Blue Ocean Project (2013–2020), he revealed a transformation of his outlook and thoughts as well as his introspection towards societal issues.

At the Gallery 1, Silk Road Project (2004–2011) is recontextualized based on documentation such as photography, films, route maps, and travel diaries. For Jeoung, traveling, migrating, and leaving were seen as artistic practices as well as ways of living life. The project enabled him to cross the border of countries, and the used banners that he gave to people created shadows under the burning sun. With this, he created and documented coincidental encounters, exchanges, incidents, and happenings. Traveling became a practice, and migration and movement became a postcard unexpected to be delayed or returned. As he departed one place, the loss of place occurred; thus, documentation and collection of the sites were inevitable for him. As the documentation and collection processes were repeated, they became varied and finally came about through the factual and edited documentation. Such a gap in his work served as a remainder, fragment, and trace of direct contact from that particular place. At the Gallery 1, that sense of absence left in his documentation is present. In the current time — where we are restricted in the movement of travel — the Silk Road Project and the scenes of sites and migration remind us that a sentiment of absence exists. This sentiment fills the distance between long ago, the present, and the past. The movement of migration that appeared in the Silk Road Project connects to the next video work by Jongkwan Paik that links pieces of the erased calendars from Jeoung’s notes, his correspondences, postcards from the past, and documentation of the artist.

The Gallery 2 presents Jeoung’s perspective on a cyclic value and vitality found in an object’s physicality. His point of view towards an object shows his formative interest in sculptures, his perception of strength and vitality inherent in objects themselves, and his thoughts on ecology. The Blue Ocean Project (2013–2020) deals with the migration of waste in combination with ocean currents. It captures ocean pollution — the common land of humankind — as physical evidence and shows the network between non-human things that interfere with humanity and accelerate incidents. The burnt plastic, entangled rock surface, and floating waste from neighboring countries through ocean currents are collected, and Jeoung coins the term of ‘floating objects’ to these items. Jeoung’s interpretation serves to recognize non-human things as interfering actors on a global level, specifically within an ecological network. It also reflects a perception regarding the common land that is linked beyond borders. The Silk Road Project directs towards the outside of the subject, as it practices encountering and exchanging. The respect toward the cycle of non-human things and strength of coexistence portrayed in Blue Ocean Project directs towards the common good that works beyond the borders of the common land.

The title For Love and Peace is a written phrase on a tent at the anti-war protest camp in Parliament Square, London. This was the last traveling destination of the Silk Road Project. Love and peace—the two words often found in Jeoung’s works —reveal the horizon of the commons that he aimed to reflect through his participatory projects. The Jeoung Jae Choul: For Love and Peace exhibition follows the attitudes echoed in his performative and bodily practice of migrating between borders, as well as his thoughts on ecology shown in cyclic objects based on his awareness of problems on the common land of humankind. With an increasing sense of planetary crisis on the common land and a new state of globalization, we face the emergence of a new boundary occupied by hostility, hatred, and conservative politics. In this “globalization-minus,” as Bruno Latour said—which encompasses the loss of solidarity and environmental destruction—Jeoung’s practices and thoughts suggest the direction we should face in times of new emerging boundaries and standards.

Silk Road Project, 2004–2011

The Silk Road Project encompasses three phases, all taking place from 2004 to 2011. The first project was a process of simple delivery and confirmation of usage. This delivery started in Seoul and extended to 22 points in China, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Those points became signs of each location through the setting up of a road of banners. Following this, the villages began to expand voluntarily. With local language translation, the artist delivered discarded banners and revisited the locations to confirm the banners’ usage and perform documentation and recollection. The Flowering Line project—a participatory project for creating shadow and rest areas with the discarded banners—was ongoing after the first project in China, Tibet, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other locations. In 2008, the second project began as the New Silk Road Project. It expanded with a concept of a bazaar in which the project became a site of dealing and exchanging held in 13 locations; this included Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey. The third project in 2010 ended in Turkey and Greece, and it made its way to Europe to complete its conclusion in London. Under the subtitle Plaza, the journey continued by making sunshades in each city to install them in the next cities, along with the making of stamps and the plaza-walking performance.

Jeoung Jae Choul

Jeoung Jae Choul (1959 – 2020, Suncheon) actively worked with sculpting media from the late 1990s to 2000. He was known for the works of Between and Forest of Seclusion. He had his _rst solo exhibition at the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation’s Art Center in 1992. From 2005, he presented and exhibited the Silk Road Project (2004 – 2011) that focused on a theme of cultural transfer and migration, of which was realized along traveling the silk road. This project was presented as several solo exhibitions at Project Space Zip, Keumsan Gallery, Kim Chong Yung Museum, and others. Later, he started Blue Ocean Project (2013 – 2020) on a theme of ocean pollution as he researched beaches in South Korea. It was shown at his solo exhibition, Tideland (JM Gallery, 2015), and group exhibitions such as Moving & Migration (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 2019), Ocean_New Messengers (Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art, 2019), and #Art #Commons #NamJunePaik (NJP Art Center, 2018). He also presented both site-speci_c works and public artworks at Jeju Biennale (Jeju Museum Of Art, 2017), Jirisan Project 2014 (Silsang Temple, 2014), and Busan Biennale (Oncheon-cheon, Busan, 2006).

Jongkwan Paik

Jongkwan Paik (b.1982) collects documentation, images, and sounds and has experimented with media within historical relationships based on research. Through a montage of re-editing and mixing collected moving images and sound, he intervenes in the history of _lms and images to question the status of today’s moving image. He is known for works such as Deportees, Cyclicla Night, and Frequency Resonance, and his works were presented at Dear Cinema (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2018), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (2018), Hamburg International Short Film Festival (2018), Tokyo Image Forum (2018), Jeonju International Film Festival (Best Director Prize, 2016), and numerous other international and domestic _lm festivals and exhibitions. He also collaborates with artists in other genres such as dance, theater, and architecture.

Ahyoung Lee

Ahyoung Lee (b.1979) is a researcher whose interest lies in writing and _nding possibilities in contemporary art history in East Asia. She focuses on research and archive exhibitions on avant-garde performances in post-war East Asia. She curated Performance Art in Asia at ACC Archive and Research (Asia Culture Center, 2015), co-curated Rehearsals from the Korean Avant-Garde Performance Archive (Korean Cultural Centre UK, 2017), and Image Anthropology, Mnemosyne Atlas (Boan Stay, 2020). She also keynoted the Korean avant-garde performance at Something in Common, a symposium on Korean-Polish performance art exchange in 2019.