Beck Jee-Sook (Art Critic, Curator)
“I am not making something, but instead, something will disappear with our intervention. This wall will be demolished.” This is what artist Jaeyeon Chung said when she was working on the Opening Project (2013), which involved taking down the wall that blocked the central pathway at ARKO Art Center. The wall was built out of architect Kim Swoo Geun’s signature red brick and its height and form had been the subject of countless revisions, supplementations, and corrections by the client, architect, the people who filed the complaint, and the evaluation committee. It eventually came to completely block the path and gaze of pedestrians for more than 30 years, from the time the building had first been designed until this project came to fruition. The eight-meter-long, 273-cm-tall wall did protect the facilities from crime, accidents, and garbage. However, a wall is a near cliche insofar as it illustrates a state of noncommunication in our everyday vernacular, which stems from rational or emotional biases, self-centeredness, disconnect, and ignorance. In a way, the power of art lies in the way it probes at old, tired thoughts and concepts, encapsulates them in a specific material form before us, reminds us of new sensations and experiences, and finally dissolves the walls within us.
The values of art, which are the focus of Jaeyeon Chung’s works, also perhaps rely on a power to replace, convert, and capsize the relationship between language, image, and material. Chung’s works show us that concepts like walls and fences not only limit our thoughts and range of activity but also diminish our ideas by the restrictions they place on our perspectives and movements that we are always and already knowingly or unknowingly subjected to. In Howick Place (2010) and Way In/Out (2009) the artist uses signs that give simple instructions to illustrate the suppressive nature of customs and institutions that are otherwise forgotten every day by visualizing the materiality of language. Comparably, the Flags series (2010, 2014), which involves displaying national flags in ways that defy protocol, portrays situations in which one’s identities are restricted by a collective symbol – at times explicitly, and at others surreptitiously.
Only after witnessing the pedestrians pass through the open space where a wall has stood for a long time, do we begin to fully realize to what extent our bodies, which are considered to be unique physical states of individuals, have been controlled and primed by the design and division of a space. In terms of recovering our existential senses, not through the construction but the destruction of material, this type of approach is “post” modern, “post” capitalist, even. In any case, instead of writing something on the wall, altering its shape, replacing it with a different material or design, etc., instead of an artist, designer, or architect performing creative roles that have been passed down from generation to generation, the tedious collaborative process of persuading and negotiating to remove the wall to realize the original intended design that only existed as an idea and blueprint, launched her into the genealogy of conceptual artists who steadfastly keep in retrograde step with the uber-materialized art world.
The artist illustrated her intent to build her concept not by presenting something, but by removing something in some of her other works, namely The Day Before Yesterday Seems More Acceptable Than Today (2014), which was installed in a small exhibition space in Mullae-dong where iron foundries can be found. This work involves scraping off layers of old paint from a column inside the gallery to reveal the cement beneath, which can be linked to another work of Chung’s entitled Nec Plus Ultra (2011). This work, which was created by engraving the phrase “nec plus ultra” from classical Herculean mythology and gilding it in gold leaf, also involves removing the thick paint to visualize the layers of time. Both works are vertical architectural structures that hold up buildings, and in and of themselves declare that they exist as cultural strata. The artist also monumentalizes the columns by erecting fences around them, and adding lighting as a gesture of resistance against the fate of the urban buildings, sucked into the ever-accelerating pace of development and redevelopment; as if to look back and remember the aesthetic values of the decorative forms and features of classical columns. In The Day Before Yesterday Seems More Acceptable Than Today is the temporal version of Nec Plus Ultra, which explores the spatial aspect, the artist traces time with her hands, instead of with a machine, to illustrate a ‘human speed’ and plays the role of an archaeologist who hunts for the veracity of myths and ideologies.
Opening Project explores themes related to mobility in the public space, as well as the vague consensus on the roles of policies that divide private and public spaces. The wall that blocks the central path through ARKO Art Center is said to have been built per the request of the residents living in the residential area behind the museum. The sharp dispute and conflict between the right to privacy versus public good isn’t new in this day and age, but in Jaeyeon Chung’s work, two kinds of waves lie dormant – “electromagnetic waves” that occur when someone privatizes publicly owned land, and “shock waves” that occur when the private sphere is exposed to the public eye. Love Letters in Hyde Park (2009), consists of two elements: emails from an ex-boyfriend were printed on large pieces of pvc scrim and then placed next to a footpath in the park. These print-outs, along with a follow-up email containing angry complaints and threats from the ex-boyfriend who later found out what had happened, were later displayed on the wall of an exhibition space. This style of work that uses the artist’s deeply personal experiences or stories is not new in the contemporary art scene. There are two notable precursor artists. Sophie Calle sent a break-up email that she had received to her acquaintances from various walks of life, collected their interpretations of the letter, and exhibited them with the title Take Care of Yourself (2007). Tracey Emin divulged her love life to the public using a tent (Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, 1995) and her bed (My Bed,1998). In the later additions to the series of emails in Love Letters in Hyde Park the ex-boyfriend calls the artist a pathetic artist wanna-be with no original ideas. He might have been criticizing the ethics of contemporary artists, but from another perspective, it can also be seen as a reflection on the blurred lines between the private and public due to the ubiquity of the internet, and the fact that no information is wholly personal anymore today. Furthermore, the work might be the artist’s rather cynical answer to the ex-boyfriend’s letters, that ideas no longer come from the artists (who are headed for the gallery) but from the general crowd (in the park), as per the general trend of the times. Because, in any case, the random collection of people in the city square is characterized by their heterogeneity and diversity unlike artists and gallery goers.
The artist’s practice of passing the ball of imagination to the public can be seen in her 2014 work entitled Entitled. Chung placed simple geometric shapes – a ball, a piece of rope, and a metal rod – and turned the table on how the audience views contemporary art. People generally tend to rely on the title of the artwork to gain some sort of understanding, but here, the audience intervenes in the artwork, changes it, chooses a title of their own, and writes it on the wall. The video documentation that features children who are playing with a ball held up by pieces of rope that are juxtaposed with scenes of the many titles on the walls ends with the work being “dislocated.” This reads as a warning against the groundless optimism of “good art” and the public-centric mindset. This work that modally illustrates how the artwork and the public deflect each other in the face of contemporary art, and extends the meaning of art to encompass doodling and play. It also poses a stream of follow-up questions regarding the potential for the implantation of art into the fields of ethics and economics.
In Jaeyeon Chung’s works, raising simple and basic questions about the issues of modern art and contemporary culture often leads to open-ended conclusions that signify an acceptance of the challenges resulting from the complaints or devastation of artists, artworks, viewers, and other related people. Alternatively, her works at times convince, compromise, and secure a breadth of understanding. Chung’s TAG (2014) is a guidebook created for the artists at the Artist Residency TEMI in Daejeon, which she also was a part of. Promotional brochures are usually created by the institution, and artists are commissioned – albeit very rarely – to create them. However, TAG is unique in that it is a guidebook that is autonomously created by an artist. The fact that the artist had to put together the basic information that was needed to be part of the residency program elicits sympathy from the audience, but it would perhaps be more appropriate to commend the artist’s feat of starting up a channel of communication among the other artists and the managerial staff, as well as creating a channel for promoting the artworks to the general public. The booklet that “provides information such as cultural facilities near the Artist Residency TEMI, art supply stores, good restaurants, and places to visit in Daejeon for Korean and international artists in residency, and the general public visiting the residency” is an intricate cultural text that encompasses public art, conceptual art, research and production, audience and the public, installation, and performance all rolled into one.
Regardless of the state, a simple question posed by the work pushes us toward – whether it is toward unexpected provocation or calm enlightenment – the strength that Jaeyeon Chung’s works is instilling in us, the power of art that permeates into the places that we spend our everyday lives in, involving many twists and turns, and that this isn’t the product of a complex that art has, that it too, has practical purposes. It is the result of refinement, of realizing the values of art that only art knows. Take, for example, Opening Project, which lowered the wall (the wall was re-installed after the end of the project but at a much lower height, no higher than one meter); Nec Plus Ultra, which contributed to turning a place that was destined to be demolished into an artist’s studio; St. Saviour’s Emergency Private Shelter (2012), which left behind its trace in the form of a bench at the Florence Trust. And as for TAG, there was such a high demand for more copies that it is currently being upgraded and reprinted next year.