Solidarity of Fragments

By Jeong Hyun (Art Critic, Professor at Inha University)

 
1.
The exhibition 《Elegant Town》 unfolds against the backdrop of countless repetitive cities produced through competitive high-speed development. These sites bear little direct relation to the artist’s personal experience or life. Jeong Kyungja captures objects and scenes she encounters by chance in these spaces, describing this process as the moment of discovering the “expression” of the city. What emerges in these expressions is a coexistence of familiarity and strangeness.

This duality stems from the ambiguity of place and the familiarity of the subjects. As a result, what governs the emotional register of the photographs is not context or situation, but poetic resonance. Objects and landscapes discovered by chance—stripped of locational identity—are brought into being through photography, through the artist’s gaze. Detached from both time and place, these images may evoke familiar memories while simultaneously disrupting familiar expectations. For the artist, the notion of coincidence is in fact closer to inevitability.

As seemingly unrelated fragments of chance are juxtaposed with disparate images, the photographs begin to articulate layered narratives. These images neither irresponsibly summon nostalgia nor construct concrete situations. Jacques Rancière argues that photographic aesthetics do not become art through resemblance to reality. Rejecting conventional image theory, he suggests that “it is a system of relations between what can be said and what can be seen, between what is visible and what is invisible.”

In other words, images—regardless of medium—are constructed through vision and language, and the emergence of artistic movements reflects not merely new artistic forms but shifts in the political conditions that shape perception. Thus, images are not to be interpreted through academic frameworks but through the discovery of new possibilities and relations by the artist.

2.
From modernity to the age of globalization, various types of urban wanderers have emerged. Image and language, literature and art, photography and media all serve as essential tools for such figures. The artist walks through cities filled with artificial beauty. Walter Benjamin admired this artificiality. Andy Warhol filmed the Empire State Building in real time, and Kimsooja traversed winding roads atop a truck loaded with bundles.

These gestures were made possible by a utopian belief that the power to overturn existing systems—and a world led by the people—could be realized through machinery and artificiality. Kang Sang-jung observed that Tokyo, as a site of globalization, has undergone “creolization.” Yet utopia is not merely paradise; it is a political arena entangled with multiple agents and interests, and above all, an object of speculation.

The dream of rapid development has come to dominate Korean society as a whole. Whether this dream still holds validity is another question. Not everyone shares it, and for many, it has become problematic. Even if younger generations perceive it not as inheritance but as burden—or even as a decayed ideology—it remains difficult to reject.

Despite this, the dream continues to shape our world: from development cities to new towns, from new towns to innovation cities, from Digital Media City to eco-cities. These developments extend beyond large-scale housing complexes, introducing new lifestyles and monumental spaces of consumption. The project of realizing utopia is bound to fail.

Advertising images that simulate utopia repeatedly and compulsively testify to the end of the age of images. Even if visual representation has shifted from spectacle to everyday life, it cannot necessarily be considered a more progressive artistic stance. Instead, we must ask whether belief in images is still possible.
 
In The Future of the Image, Rancière critiques the inertia of semiotic approaches that mourn the “end of the image,” arguing that modernist art—from the Russian avant-garde to abstract expressionism—did not abolish images. He asserts that we no longer live in a time when the pleasures of semiotic interpretation remain valid.

In contemporary photography, attempts to move beyond semiotics are widespread: photographing Cold War relics or monuments produced by developmentalism, or treating objects, people, cities, and nature as equivalents—all point toward a postmodern condition in which signifier and signified no longer align. Here, images resist semiotic interpretation and must instead be approached aesthetically and discursively. Whether this signals an end or a transformation of the system of life is difficult to determine—but Rancière would likely argue for the latter.

 
3.
Jeong Kyungja neither asserts the purity of photography nor relies on meaning-making grounded in semiotics. Faced with images in which place and subject remain indeterminate, viewers draw upon memory, knowledge, and experience to compare them with similar references. We recognize them only as something vaguely familiar—unfinished buildings, surreal landscapes—yet cannot fully grasp them.

The artist wanders around the clichés of utopia constructed through complex interests and desires, uncovering subjects and presences concealed behind exaggerated façades and stylized graphics. These are things that cannot be seen within the blind momentum of progress. Can these chance encounters be understood as systems of visible and invisible relations? Can we critically identify possibilities that exceed the artist’s immediate psychological impulse? Rancière writes that “in a certain sense, the image resides in the heart of things as a mute form of speech.”

Jeong Kyungja’s photographs inherently contain time, language, and narrative. She dissects the visible world—not in the manner of anatomical analysis seeking truth, but by delimiting her perceptual boundaries and extracting fragments of the world as images. These captured scenes do not belong to grand historical narratives; they exist outside history, born of contingency rather than permanence.

Through this process of extraction, the artist presents poetic moments. Yet these moments should not be mistaken for mere expressions of beauty. They are fragments of the world—simultaneously partial and socially obscured expressions.

4.
The collaged imagery presented in 《Elegant Town》 appears to invite viewers to seek similarities and differences among images. While combinations of images may initially seem alike, their resemblance lies only in formal qualities—color, texture, and shape—rather than shared subject matter. Contradictions emerge throughout: the juxtaposition of steel structures rising above walls with plants stretching skyward; fluorescent lights reminiscent of works by Dan Flavin alongside images of ping-pong balls; nature and artificiality, art and everyday life.

These are not directives from the artist but outcomes of a society driven toward success—products of coincidence that reveal a field of life that cannot be fully controlled. Returning to a new regime of perception, Jeong Kyungja’s photographs hover between what can be said and what can be seen. The monumental spectacles of cities shaped by development and desire openly declare what we seek. Even without explicit imagery, the aesthetics of such scenes continuously propose what can be articulated.
 
Within this dynamic, Jeong Kyungja encounters subjects that have lost their voice—objects that certainly exist yet are excluded due to their excessive familiarity. These embody Roland Barthes’ concept of punctum, the “that-has-been.” Yet 《Elegant Town》 does not remain at the level of emotional resonance.

It goes further, revealing the latent vitality that resists complete control and the persistence of life within systems of planning and regulation. In her video works, sentences excerpted from novels or dramas are arbitrarily combined with images, generating infinite meanings depending on the viewer’s interpretation. Rather than subsuming fragments into a unified whole, the artist arranges them in parallel, allowing unpredictable meanings to emerge.

While this method remains experimental, one might anticipate that it will open a different horizon from artists such as Martha Rosler and Sophie Calle. Ultimately, one hopes that her “photographic moment” will make the invisible visible and bring us closer to the murmuring voices of those who cannot speak.

References

• 《우아한 도시 (Elegant Town)》