Juri Cho(Independent Curator)
Jaeyeon Chung is an artist who was born and raised in Seoul, Korea in 1979. She has lived, thought, and worked with the memories that most people of that generation have of the city and its ups and downs. When revisiting Jaeyeon Chung’s early works, which gained recognition through a number of her early projects that were carried out in public locations, instead of immediately exploring serious ideas that words like history and space convey, she made somewhat noncommittal artistic gestures within individual, everyday life, and mundane settings and corners. Chung tended towards plotting fluid situations and inviting the audience to react and make different choices instead of creating dazzling spectacles and objects with out-of-the-ordinary features.
With such a background in mind, Chung seems to have reached something of a turning point , as seen in her latest major project entitled Lost Corner, which is focused on a more concrete object. More specifically, she works with the material reality of historical architecture and visualizes the objects of her work by any means available to her. However, there are some continuities with the previous work. She keeps the messages of her works open-ended in ways that seem to somehow obscure the previous work she has done.
In many ways, Lost Corner_Memory Archive feels like a sequel to her previous exhibition Lost Corner (2018). The work lingers in the shadows of one formative memory – about an old museum (the former National Museum of Korea and Japanese Government General Building) which connects her childhood to her current self, now in her 40s. While her previous show was a confession of the incongruity between personal memory and public records, the new show sheds light on the confusion and unease she felt, and compares the divisive stances of different actors in the story from an arm’s length to gain more perspective. The perspective on memory has shifted from her own intimate memories to the memories of others, and the act of quietly replicating the blueprints of the now demolished building in etchings has transformed into a bold journey to seek out people she doesn’t know. The emotional fascination and reasoning processes that attracted her to a specific space, and sparked her initial curiosity into architecture at the surface level, developed into a self-reflective exploration of individual historical ethics and ethnicity shaped by society and culture.
This exhibition is, in a way, a private account of public records that the artist has been collecting over the past year or so, the fragments of memories that have been edited by the keyboard historians who flood the internet, and the voices of the people that the artist encountered in Korea and Japan. While Chung has been working on this project, which has unexpectedly taken years, she has taken on the roles of a pseudo-journalist who created historical documentaries, an installation and performance artist who turned her own psychological struggles, and historical spaces with no roots into a maze, and the voice that narrates a film essay.
The exhibition remembers, forgets, romanticizes, and at the same time betrays the memory of a building that is marked by extreme political and historical turbulence and embodies fragmented placeness and alternative perspectives. The stance and credo of the six speakers that the artist found and interviewed exemplify voices that have been excluded from the public records or deviate from the collective sensibilities that form a consensus. The interplay and conflict between the record and memory are the essential driving force of her work. The past few years have been a challenging journey. She painstakingly filled in the faint traces of a building that a national power took great efforts to wipe out, rebuilt the remnants of a vanished space by accumulating stones on an empty plot of land, and she projected an alluring shadow of a rose window. And, eventually, she set out to search for scattered voices. What has Jaeyeon Chung been looking for? Perhaps she has been looking for the traces of memories that are shattered and skewed as if seen through a kaleidoscope that refracts architecture, place, history, and the nation-state. Or perhaps it was a roundabout excavation of herself. I think of the strange corner spaces where Jaeyeon Chung would probably be lingering: weathered over time, scored by the excavator, covered up with overflowing words, now disappeared. I await the unfamiliar memories, familiar losses, and things that I might encounter around the next corner.