ENGLISH

Bird Eat Bird

Ji hyun Jung

2013. 6. 12 - 7. 13







Jiyun Jung holds his third solo exhibition. Continued from his previous exhibitions - Words Left Unsaid(Gallery Skape, 2010) in which he created an attic in the ceiling of the exhibition space and Away from Here(Project Space Sarubia, 2011) where he built a hut with temporary walls – the current solo exhibition takes Bird Eat Bird as its title. As seen in the title of the exhibition, what one should take note in the exhibition is the process of the gradual expansion/transformation of the artist's world through which he has been showing via 'words.' Jung takes words about the recurring events and accidents that benumb individuals as the subject of his works. In the meantime, he takes the material of his works from objects that are thrown away in the certain gaps within the capitalist world of rapid circulation of production, consumption and disposal. In very simple terms, Jihyun Jung has been liberating himself from the helplessness by reflecting his pity towards the words that melt into the air or towards the ones that are scattered even before they form any meaning in this mindlessly fast-moving world. He created different combinations of objects he picked up on the streets. For him, the undigested words and discarded objects were seen to form a couplet of sympathy, depending on each other. Thus, he made a place for 'words left unsaid' at a corner of a ceiling in the exhibition space at one occasion. In another occasion, he materialized a room for words that were 'away from here' in the space beyond temporary walls in the exhibition. In the current solo exhibition, however, one can sense a bit different current from the previous ones. The exhibition tells in its title that a bird is eating a bird. In the meantime, the artist, always having been staging a theatrical appreciation of his works with consideration of audiences, gradually lures the audience to his labyrinth in the deep. There, a certain landscape is waiting for you the audience.





Thames , 153 days drawing, pencil on paper, 18x26 cm, 2012




Worlds Moving Apart

 

Be careful not to fall into a trap: This is a greeting that Jung wants to provide to his audiences who are about to enter the space he constructed. While looking at the three stories of the exhibition space of the IAS(Insa Art Space) building, you will fail several times if you try to see something that is obvious. The space is filled with creaking movements of cute or queer objects and poetic rhythms that are transformed from whispers and pieces of melodies that you might once hear of. It is also occupied with the sentiment of cruel fairy tales. Do escape from his space before you are seduced to some fragments of his creation, or before you make a conclusion that the space is a self-sufficient world of an artist. The whole space is a manifestation of a journey of an artist who has been constantly changing his role as a receiver, a sender and a guide of a world that is yet unknown. The landscapes that we will encounter in each story of the IAS building also unfold differently.

What audiences encounter upon entering the exhibition are a series of drawings depicting the Thames. During his stay in London for about a year, the artist went to the river every day for more than half an hour. He created drawings of the surface of the river, which were accompanied by his record of the kinds and speeds of passing ships and the weather. Such beginning of the work seemed to have been unclear, even for the artist. It can be only assumed that the regularity of performing something in a constant manner might have sustained him as an artist during his time in an alien land. According to the artist's note, his job during the mandatory military service for 2 years was to watch the sea whole day and record details of passing ships. In his series of drawings, he imposes his past assignment – in which he had to process the same job in a perfect manner in a repeated manner – that he did during the time when every singe day did not feel so much different to him. While earnestly performing his assignment, he becomes a receiver that recognizes a world through his inevitable diligence. Behind the river drawings lies a video of his small rafts that he sent afloat along the river. Indeed, picking up discarded objects and creating a temporary solidarity from their composition has been a repeated theme in Jung's body of work. Then, when he - who had been receiving the images of the river and drawing them - created small rafts by combining objects he had picked up on the street and sent them afloat to somewhere, there was a change from being a receiver to being a sender. Following the artist that stands up from his long-occupied place and walks towards another world, we should also move ourselves.





Bird Eat Bird , Motor,Branch,Resin, Mixed Media, 2013




The exhibition on the second floor presents different scenes the artist has encountered in the world. At one side of the floor, a tragedy – a bird eats another bird – is presented, while a kind of hope – a device that attempts to create a rainbow operates once in every five minutes – emerges at another side. At one corner of the exhibition, there emerges a scene from one's life - a sound of clipping nails coming from time to time from inside a small house. The scenes are completed by themselves to some degrees, not interfering with each other. What is interesting is that the repeated behaviors of the objects do not presume a certain hope, while Suddenly, Rainbow provides us with a possibility of seeing a rainbow with its spray of water every five minutes – they tell us that we cannot see the rainbow yet we are not in a complete hopelessness. It is no more than a series of continued attempts towards certain chances. It does not promise the moment when all our wishes come true nor give up and stop everything. A certain artificial world opens itself up in somewhere beyond. It emerges in the endless spinning world that resembles a mechanical cuckoo in a cuckoo clock that endlessly sings every hour in a house with no one in it.

 


Suddenly, Rainbow , Servo motor,Spray,Light, Mixed Media, 2013




here does this world would reach? The rest of the journey continues in the basement floor of the IAS building. In this space where a labyrinth is led to the seats for the audience, there is no fixed direction of appreciation. The reeds and lightings that are fixed to the wood pillars of the labyrinth move and change their brightness in reaction to visitors that enter the space. On the one hand, they expand to the amplified shadows on the walls. On the other hand, they are translated into an unrecognizable language via a Morse code transmitter at a corner. Some might create narratives of the movements by sitting on the seats and appreciating the patterns of shadows on the walls; others might build stories from them by enjoying the translation of Morse code messages into letters, which is displayed on a small monitor. The source of the occasional sound is recorded clips from an hourly traffic report on the radio. The words from the recording state information in the present tense - it snows, it rains, traffic is building up on a certain bridge, and the road is empty - and drives the present towards a riddling time and space.





Citizen Band , Radio transceiver, Mixed Media, 2013




Before everything is dissolved in between the request upon revealing the identity and the ever-emerging categories of dichotomy, what we need to have is an established world where we can observe a possibility from its birth to its complete extinction. What is more important than the scale and the result of that world is the density of opportunities that construct the world. What the artist presents here is the very world. Movingly, however, the artificial world constructed by an artist reacts to you the audience and moves out from the self-sufficient boundary. It does so even if such an end would be at a monitor displaying broken words or at a blocked wall with lurking illusions of shadows.




TI hear the ocean , Square lumber, Reed, Motor, Speaker, Mixed Media, 2013 




 A Completely Strange World




The world we live in is a world in which mystery is extinct. Every single object is born with a profile of its pre-determined use, reasonable price and lifespan. In the time when people saw elf fires nearby old houses or around tombs, mystery was attached to people's lives. People even prayed to water in a bowl then.

We have lost our ability to sense the other half of the world. It happened while we were living in the prescribed order, surrounded by objects that were given purposiveness. It was also from our recognition of the world within the boundaries of systems, signs and representations of the systematically inherited senses that we had learnt and made as our habit. If we could find something anew through objects around us, such moment would emerge without one's knowledge via the sinister aspects of the objects. Jihyun Jung's hands, constructing unfamiliar faces from objects with shredded profile, provides us with an opportunity to restore the emotion and senses through the mystery of objects that are yet unnamed. However, there needs to be yet another chance to realize it. If our lives lack a permanent magically, it is because we merely stay at observing the behaviors done by objects. For the artist, this might have been the reason to move a step further from exhibiting objects and to construct a 'space to enter.' Within the experience of changing the embedded movements of the space by yourself, there opens a door, which is a gate to enter the completely strange world.




Related Project

Strangeness Not in Front of Your  Eyes

 

While preparing for the current exhibition, the artist (Jihyun Jung) and IAS strived to think of a 'different' structure to revisit certain parts of the presented works and expand them. The current project departed from a question towards the transmission and reception of sensation and action, and a question on the world that is simultaneously an object and a subject of such phenomena. Hyunjun Jang(choreographer), another artist who has been elaborating on the matter, decided to work together in the experiment. Strangeness Not in Front of Your Eyes was produced through a process of sharing and borrowing each other's worldview by becoming each other's object with discussions and debates, and the work is materialized as movements of the body in the exhibition space of IAS.

 

#1. My hands detect your neck, and your hands detect my neck.n The vibration of a voice that is not mine and the tactile sensation of heart beat that is not in my possession... They make one be aware of the other's pose and condition. My palms are bombarded with several different information, and such sensations sometimes feel as conditions of 'uncomfortableness,' 'threat,' 'consolation' and maybe 'certain feelings.' 

 

# 2.What has to be read in here is a book sitting in front of a fan, which randomly flips its pages. The velocity and timing of the fan is operated upon my movement. The differing performers A and B - one of them is me - start reading the presented pages(a score), but it is eventually a 'translation of sound' on their given text, ignoring the 'conversation(performance).' Ping pong balls, which dropped unexpectedly from time to time, become an element that calls their attention. However, the situation goes back to where it was started, and the murmuring that is without any recipient continues to expand. 

 

# 3. Facing my object in front of my eyes, I concentrate on a part of the object. I look into the object. While debris as a part of something is not an object as a whole, but it becomes an object of a more concentrated attention. Though it doesn't speak to me, I concentrate my eyes and conscious on the debris to transmit information, and ... (The idea should be developed from here.) 




 After all, what is the very corner of the world that we are trying to look back? What was to achieve by sharing and borrowing of each other's understanding and motivation while being remotely different from each other?  There is no reason for many people to labor on reviewing the "corner(a world beyond the world)." There is also no special obligation and justification for that. However, the notion of a corner presumes the existence of a direction. Whether it is from or to here or there, or from and to anywhere, one can look back at certain things when there is a direction. To talk more specifically, what we have deliberated together is far from confirming the existence of a 'corner' that cannot be understood by talking, reading, or touching with our senses or from the identification of its own unfamiliarity. Rather, it must be closer to a role of a scouter who advances with his wide-opened eyes for the thing that he does not even know whether it exists or not.