Poster image of 《Lost Corner》 © Art Space Grove

The Loss of Memory and the Restoration of Counter-Memory

Reflecting on Jaeyeon Chung's everyday manner of speaking and her works to date, both seem to reflect, with a certain nonchalance, the uneven order and shifting temperatures of a world in which definitive answers may not exist in the first place, may be multiple depending on the circumstances, or may change each time according to how a question is framed.

Her interests seem to lie in the territory outside a world of categorical certainties, the fragile foundations supporting what appears to be firmly established, and the invisible chains connecting an irretrievable distant past to the microhistories of the present.

Accordingly, in this exhibition, 《Lost Corner》, which appears to explore "place" as a solid physical reality and individual "memory" as something that speculatively constructs and reconfigures it, the stories she brings forth and the landscapes she unfolds likewise engage with a world of contradictions that offers no clear-cut answers.

Her earlier works, categorized as early works (2009–2014), tended to generate conditions and questions by gently unsettling the notions of place and the ways in which it is consumed, both of which had been unquestioningly established within particular social groups, through artistic interventions and performative actions in public spaces.

Often stepping lightly beyond the confines of galleries and residency spaces, Chung actively wandered through public spaces as situations in which artworks and audiences could encounter one another directly. In doing so, she has continued to construct narratives around the effectiveness and failures of communication that she sought to experiment with herself as a Situationist.

Installation view of 《Lost Corner》 © Art Space Grove

Since 2016, Jaeyeon Chung has gradually moved away from observing and intervening in physically present places, instead turning toward the configurations of memory embedded in her own experiences and unconscious. Through various media, she has begun to reconstruct and retrace thoughts that have lost their way within the mind palace of the past, along with memories of places buried within it.

Tracing the trajectory of her artistic practice over the past two or three years reveals subtle yet distinct shifts in both her approach and choice of media. In her 2017 work Retrace, Chung reconstructed the former Government-General of Korea building, a now-demolished colonial structure, through printmaking.

In her childhood memories, the building remains associated less with the oppressive atmosphere of the colonial era symbolized by the Government-General of Korea than with a sense of beauty and tranquility, evoked by the grandeur of its Neoclassical architecture, Gothic elegance, and lavish interiors.

However, the building, regarded in the national consciousness as a shameful remnant of colonial rule that needed to be erased, was officially demolished following the establishment of South Korea's first civilian administration.

For approximately seventy years, this colonial façade and the complexes associated with it had stood in the same location, assuming different names according to the purposes and values assigned to it by successive eras. Its former site has now become a place where fragmented individual memories intersect with the collective amnesia of a new era, surviving only through photographs, documents, and footage of its demolition.

For Chung, the former National Museum building, which no longer exists, represents a kind of “Lost Corner”, a territory that has disappeared. Yet physical destruction or nonexistence does not necessarily lead directly to a psychological state of "loss" (亡失). The term literally means "to have been lost and thus ceased to exist," implying an involuntary intention that is difficult to identify and an ambiguous process.

For the artist, it therefore serves as an apt expression of how memories of a place that remains a defining scene from her childhood, along with landscapes deeply imprinted upon her sense of self, have been erased and silenced by the self, sinking beyond the threshold of consciousness as they became absorbed into an institutionalized system of collective memory.

Installation view of 《Lost Corner》 © Art Space Grove

Meanwhile, political correctness in relation to history and an individual's speculative memories and personal tastes are not opposing forces that can exist only through mutual negation. Rather, they belong to distinct realms and may at times contradict one another. Topophilia, the emotional attachment an individual develops toward a place, is profoundly subjective and sometimes persists in the form of "counter-memory," which runs counter to collectively accepted memories.

In the exhibition, we witness how the storehouse of memory was sealed off at the point where the conventional understanding of a place diverges from an individual's particular experience of it, and how the artist subsequently attempts to reconstruct her memory palace and reclaim the counter-memories she had suppressed within herself.

Rather than faithfully reproducing the grandeur of Neoclassical architecture and its elaborate ornamental details, which evoke a kind of colonial nostalgia, Jaeyeon Chung expresses herself indirectly through distorted landscapes composed of fragments and flashes of former architectural imagery meticulously recreated through etching, audiovisual narratives with disjointed timelines, and physical performances that are earnest yet somehow absurd. The process of recovering memory, along with its faint traces and clues, remains scattered throughout this labyrinth.

Yet what Chung seeks to achieve through the acts of remembering presented in the exhibition does not seem to be merely the reconstruction of distant memories that have escaped an individual, nor a belated attempt to give voice to something that has long remained unspoken. Her painstakingly repeated printmaking processes, videos featuring herself as a performer, and sounds that fall out of sync with the moving images each articulate, in distinct ways, the ambiguous spaces between contradictions and paradoxes she has experienced or that remain unresolved.

There are no definitive hypotheses, clearly defined themes or methodologies, nor any inductively derived conclusions. Rather, the artist seems to be continuously recalibrating her position within various binary structures: the self she perceives as her own autonomous subject and the self shaped by sociocultural forces, the inner and outer dimensions of identity, the individual and the collective, political correctness and personal inclination, and the inscription and dissolution of a sense of place.

Installation view of 《Lost Corner》 © Art Space Grove

When the artist's artistic endeavors and everyday practices are understood as fragments of a process through which she retrieves and restores moments of forgetting and dissociation that bordered on willful oblivion, and as attempts to revisit the ambiguous and uncomfortable emotions she had relegated to the discarded recesses of memory while tracing the origins of her particular aesthetic sensibilities and tastes, it becomes possible to recognize that “Lost Corner” refers to more than merely an obscure corner or architecture that has disappeared with the passage of time.

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