Jung Jungho, Arabesque, 2022 © Jung Jungho

Jung Jungho's new work Arabesque was photographed near Artplug Yeonsu, where he was participating in an artist residency. After moving into the residency in Yeonsu-gu, Incheon, the first thing he did was examine Google Maps, where an enormous secondhand automobile trading complex caught his attention.

Having previously worked on a similar automobile district in Janganpyeong, Seoul, several years earlier, it was perhaps inevitable that his gaze would turn toward this place. As I looked at photographs of the complex on his computer screen, the artist began by describing the stories that had disappeared from the site: "This land was originally a recreation area with a beautiful lake and swimming pools.

It was a romantic destination that virtually everyone in Incheon had visited. It was also famous for its restaurant district known as Crab Street, and there were many hotels." Only then did old memories of Songdo Recreation Area gradually return to me. "Shall we go to Songdo or Wolmido?" Having spent my childhood and adolescence in Bucheon, a neighboring city of Incheon, Songdo was a familiar destination for family outings.

The secondhand automobile trading complex occupying the former Songdo Recreation Area had flourished as a popular national leisure destination during the 1960s through the 1980s and remained one of the metropolitan area's leading recreational sites until the mid-1990s. Recreation areas on the outskirts of Seoul, which had once served as escapes for urban residents, gradually lost their place to large amusement parks and new leisure facilities that emerged after the late 1990s, eventually fading from public memory.

Even for someone like me, who once dreamed of visiting Incheon on Children's Day, memories of Songdo had long since grown faint. Today, the name Songdo primarily evokes the image of a smart city, but it was originally assigned during the Japanese colonial period. Developed at the time as a modern resort destination, the new town of Songdo featured an artificial beach, for which sand was reportedly transported from Muuido Island.

Having passed through the historical scars of colonial modernization, the area served as a major recreational destination for the Seoul metropolitan region for more than forty years beginning in 1963. In 2011, however, Songdo Recreation Area closed, and the enormous lake at its center was filled in, subjecting the site to yet another process of artificial transformation and bringing it under the full influence of global urban capital.

As development plans were repeatedly revised, the land was left neglected. Secondhand automobile businesses gradually moved in, and the area became a major center for the export trade supplying countries in the Global South, eventually developing into the extensive secondhand automobile market that exists today.

Local residents tend to have complicated and somewhat negative feelings toward this place, where most of the people coming and going are foreigners of Arab origin who have little interaction with the surrounding community. Many households retain personal memories of the site's earlier history, and it must have been uncomfortable to witness a place filled with private nostalgia become increasingly occupied by accumulated machinery parts, endless movements of cars without license plates, and local restaurant streets transformed into unfamiliar Arab restaurants.

What drew Jung into the interior of this place, beyond such perceptions of division and separation, was his continued interest in tracing the transformation of urban culture and its remaining traces through photography. A representative example is Leisure Town(2020), produced during his residency at the Gyeonggi Creation Center, which documented the remnants of suburban leisure culture around Daebudo.

Another is Archive: Machines, Automobiles, and the City(2018), which recorded the secondhand automobile district of Janganpyeong in Seoul, an area facing the threat of redevelopment and possible disappearance. Extending these earlier projects, Arabesque(2022), photographed in Songdo, brings a human perspective to the transformation of urban spaces under the influence of global capital, the distance between such spaces and their surrounding communities, and the everyday activities through which life continues within them.

In this work, Jung does not attempt to construct a photographic mise-en-scène based on the site's layered history or a nostalgic view of its past. Instead, he enters the seemingly disorderly interior of the secondhand automobile complex to document the ways life operates there and the relationships formed among its subjects.

Moving through this enormous city-like landscape of automobiles, Jung chose a bicycle as his means of transportation. By passing through narrow roads, he sought to record the site unobtrusively without arousing suspicion among the foreign workers there. The work's resemblance to a scene from reportage photography, in which a photographer enters a restricted area to expose conditions on the ground, arises from this particular distance of observation and physical position.

Many of the resulting photographs contain blurred subjects, imperfect focus, or compositions tilted diagonally. Compared with his earlier photographs of the secondhand automobile district in Janganpyeong, their compositions are markedly different. While the earlier images vividly conveyed the physical presence of overlooked mechanical components through their organic structures, the new photographs incorporate the difficulty of approaching or closely observing their subjects into the photographic frame itself.

Because the area was rarely visited by outsiders, the artist's physical inability to examine its interior at length became inscribed in fleeting encounters captured while cycling past. Here, the decisive moment recorded by his photographs lies in the material presence of the site and its subjects, suspended between looking and documenting.

The distance between the subject and the camera reveals the gap and tension separating this place, isolated in the middle of the city, from the outside world. The scenes captured in photographs that are out of focus also contain multiple layers of stories that cannot be confined within a single frame. As Jung writes in his artist's notes, "The scenes unfolding here today, as always, must be recorded and remembered, even if only now.

Here were the old cars we once drove, and within them were people we had forgotten." The ethical concerns that arise between observation and documentation play a decisive role in shaping the final form of his photographs. The decisive moments he proposes are connected to capturing unstable places that have continued to function tirelessly at the heart of urban culture yet remain vulnerable to the desires of capital, along with the invisible subjects left behind in their wake.

His gaze encompasses land transformed countless times by turbulent history, discarded automobiles gathered there, foreign workers, mechanical components that will be shipped abroad and given new lives, and aging industries that may one day be expelled from the site. Together, these elements convey traces of contemporary time and space that resist compression within the photographic frame. In this sense, Jung's photographs leave us with both a serious question and a response concerning how photography today might capture urban space through its frame.

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