Yeondoo Jung has primarily produced photographic and video work in which fantasy coexists with the real world, the ideal contrasted with reality, and different cultures are fused. Jung has additionally documented the conceptualization and production processes of his art. At work on a project, he invariably engages a broad perspective. When selecting locations or objects for his work, Jung does not apply any constraints regarding age, gender, nationality, or cultural background; instead he works with diverse models and sites.

Although Jung majored in sculpture in college, in graduate school in the UK he also began creating photographs and gradually established himself as an artist in this medium. While attending school in London in the mid-1990s, I had the opportunity to curate an art exhibition with Korean artists studying in the city. Jung was among those who took part in the show and I recall vaguely that Jung placed thick slices of cheese on bread and heated it in a microwave oven, then formed the hot and gooey cheese into a human face and photographed it. As a graduate student of sculpture at the time, Jung did not appear to have completely freed himself from his major, but he had already selected photography as a medium to convey his interests.

One of the themes which interested the artist from the beginning is the uninhibited and lighthearted infringement of cultural stereotypes, along with intentionally highlighting the cognitive distress caused by a mixture of heterogeneous cultures. Jung has portrayed Korean faces using cheese, a staple in Western cuisine much like kimchi in Korean. For his show Elvis Gungjungbanjum (1999) at the Sungkok Art Museum, held following his return to Seoul, he put up a performance on Chinese noodle home delivery. By focusing on a form of delivery culture unfamiliar in London but ubiquitous in Seoul, Jung highlighted a difference between the two cities in terms of lifestyle and the social recognition of delivery as a form of labor.

Next, Jung began creating collages of ordinary people he encountered on the subways of London and Seoul and arranged them side-by-side in a virtual world, juxtaposing small with large, male with female, and Asian with Westerner. This project was instrumental in cultivating his artistry of drawing motifs from his experiences of distinct cultures during his study abroad, as well as detailed observations of anonymous people.

Jung’s subsequent project was a performance photograph series titled, Boramae Dancehall, which received significant public recognition. He transformed subway line 7 cars and exhibition gallery space into a dancehall, and converted the dances of ordinary people into an artistic performance. He also conveyed the mood of these performances in photographs. In a stage-like environment set up in a middle class neighborhood in Seoul, middle-aged men and women dance the tango, which originated from the opposite corner of the globe.

This situation is authentic, yet seems unreal since it is a sphere wherein two distinct spaces and time periods, two different cultures are fused and crossed. However, through Jung’s presentations, we can understand the situation within the context of reality and more clearly recognize and respond to it. In the majority of his early work the artist adopts a light and humorous touch in delivering his subject matter, and presents artworks that juxtapose motifs discovered from the artist’s daily experiences, or sometimes disturbs time and space to induce a cognitively distressing effect, and at other times instigates a sense of nostalgia for memories and emotions.

The important artworks that brought him critical recognition from the art world were the ‘Evergreen Tower’ (2001), ‘Bewitched’ (2001), and ‘Wonderland’ (2004) series that fell in line with his previous work. The ‘Bewitched’ series was named after and inspired by the eponymous American sitcom that ran from 1964 to 1972. In this show, a witch, the main character, performs teleportation and telekinetic magic by wiggling her nose. Despite its incredulous concept, the show gained wide popularity and was aired in many countries, including Korea.

Jung’s ‘Bewitched’ series shows a pair of portraits of the same person in nearly identical postures. One is of the person at present, the other is his or her future self representing their accomplished dreams: a young Korean teen working in a gas station in Seoul with a dream of becoming a Formula 1 champion; a Chinese waitress working at a karaoke bar in Beijing with a dream of becoming a pop star; a Japanese high school student dreaming of releasing the stress of daily life by climbing a soaring mountain peak, along with other similar scenarios. The portraits present not only the hopes of each individual, but also the social context in which the characters live out ordinary lives in their homelands.

In ‘Wonderland’, an extension of the ‘Bewitched’ series, Jung’s photography realizes the fantasies of children as expressed in their drawings. In preparation for this project, the artist served as a kindergarten teacher for four months, observing children’s behaviors and thoughts, and collected 1,200 drawings. Throughout the crafting of ‘Bewitched’ and ‘Wonderland’, he adhered to certain principles as a realizer of dreams. First of all, the artist needs to fully understand the objects depicted or the children who created the drawings--the source of his inspiration. In order to faithfully actualize the dreams in detail, rather than relying on the facile aid of computer-generated graphics he constructed the spaces and figures with his own hands or hired professionals to custom-make clothing and props for the shoots. Jung’s dream realization project was established in this manner. The two series, Wonderland and Bewitched, entice viewers to project their own dreams onto the photographs by constructing the illusion that the artist makes dreams come true.

The ‘Evergreen Tower’ series (2001) took a distinctly different approach to its objects than did its predecessors. Around the time of its production, freestanding houses in Korea were gradually being replaced by apartment buildings, uniform communal spaces. The series is a collection of portrait-like images of 32 families in their living rooms, all residing in identical units of an apartment building called Evergreen Tower. Showcasing the families’ individuality situated in diverse furniture arrangements and decorations of their living rooms, Jung awakens the voyeuristic instinct in the audience, which becomes enthralled in comparing their own living rooms to their Evergreen counterparts.

As an extension of ‘Bewitched’ and ‘Wonderland’, the artist commenced the production of the ‘Location’ series in 2005. As the title indicates, the series was produced in a variety of sites both at home and abroad, such as highway rest stops, Jeju Island, Mt. Seorak and a beach on New York State’s Long Island. By appending artificial lighting and devices to natural scenery, Jung established the co-existence of fiction and reality as he had done in previous projects. Through this process, he focused on the surrealistic quality that sprouts up at the intersection of actual and fictional images. The photographs, containing ambivalent landscapes shared by reality and fantasy, allow their viewer to pass beyond spatial and temporal limitations and simultaneously experience a yearning for the past and hopes for the future.

In 2007, Jung was named Artist of the Year by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea. At the celebratory exhibition hosted by the museum, he presented Boramae Dance Hall, Location, and Documentary Nostalgia, the last of which is a two-part installation piece. The audience for Documentary Nostalgia first enters a space displayed like a living room where they may sit on a couch and watch a wall-mounted plasma television playing a video composed of six scenes. The room leads into a spacious exhibition gallery equipped with a camera and other recording devices, lights and props; the video shown earlier was recorded here over 70 minutes in a single take. The ‘video’ in the first room and the ‘installed works’ in the second room the props and devices constitute Documentary Nostalgia.

As noted above, in his video, photograph and installation works, Jung has conveyed the memories, cognitive distress, and hopes for the future that all originate in the boundaries between reality and imagination, the contrast between the ideal and the real. In creating his work, the artist carries out processes of seeking, producing, experiencing, and photographing as diligently as possible and strives to take every step on his own terms. Rather than adopting the simpler methods offered by today’s digital environment, Yeondoo Jung remains faithful to his personal technique of branding his author’s signature to every element of his story to allow an intense and intimate communication with his audience.

References

• [비평] 정연두의 작품 세계
  [Critique] The World of Yeondoo Jung's Art Work