Sojung Jun is an artist working in diverse mediums including video, sound, sculpture, and publication, to create non-linear space and time that evokes new perceptions of history and the present. Exploring ways in which change of physical boundaries penetrates everyday sensual experiences, she traces the scenes, moments, and voices of the people excluded from our contemporary sense of speed.

Presented on the media wall in Leeum’s lobby, “Sojung Jun: Green Screen” is composed of three of her works related to the experience and imaginary of borders: Green Screen (2021), Eclipse (2020), and Early Arrival of Future (2015). Considering the media wall’s unusual location in a lobby connecting the museum’s various spaces and serving as an arcade for temporary gatherings, Jun conceived of the program by approaching the media wall as a medium as well as a device. A rather vulnerable space for exhibition, the media wall offered her a device for managing time and maximizing senses – something similar to such fictional spaces located in reality as “portals, wormholes, chukjibeop (a hypothetical method of folding space and shrinking distance), and time travel to the fourth dimension,” as the artist puts it. This view corresponds to how she perceives Korea’s Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as a twilight zone full of potentials in Green Screen (2021), from which this program’s title is derived.

Jun carefully structured the three works to resonate with one another within the media wall’s timeline. Eclipse, a work inspired by the life and music of composer Isang Yun, interweaves the perspectives of the inside and the outside surrounding the division and border of the Korean Peninsula. Early Arrival of Future captures the moment at which a North Korean musician and a South Korean musician collaborate on a piano duo performance through dialogue and consent. The program begins and ends with Green Screen, which unfolds green sceneries of the DMZ, thus providing a ground for the one-time monumental collaboration. The superimposition of the three works—Early Arrival of Future which summons a future into the present, Green Screen which creates ruptures in reality and perception, and Eclipse which translates our imagining the border as a sliding image—is to temporarily construct non-linear space and time. Fictional realities thus created will rattle our sense of borders and create fractures.



Works

The title Early Arrival of Future is borrowed from the term that North Korean defectors residing in South Korea use to refer to themselves as harbingers of a unified Korea. The “future” here means both a future that has not yet come and a future that is difficult to reach. Jun’s Early Arrival of Future shows two pianists—one from South Korea and the other from North Korea—performing together in harmony, facing each other with pianos in the middle. The joint performance of artists from two different systems is to pose questions about whether they can overcome ideological and political conflicts through their artistic imaginations. The unprecedented collaboration of North and South Korean pianists was contrived by Jun as a product of deep conversations and exchanges of ideas.

Eclipse I and Eclipse II are both two-channel video works based on performances of two songs composed for two specific instruments: harp and North Korean gayageum.* They are meant to evoke the life and music of composer Isang Yun, exploring the senses elicited by the ongoing experience of the separation of Korea. In 1977, Yun composed Double Concerto, music that compares the Korean folktale of Gyeonwoo and Jiknyeo (two lovers separated by Milky Way) to the relationship of North and South Korea. Korea remains divided to this day, of course, and in Eclipse Jun uses image and sound to explore the seemingly deep psychological and physical distances between the peoples. Playing with the dizzying intersections of horizontal and vertical lines of the string instruments and the performers’ fingers, Jun’s videos create equally dizzying montages of images that constantly slide and fragment. In the midst of disorienting encounters of angles and viewpoints, they also capture fleeting, ephemeral points of accord. Collaborators include Soona Park (North Korean gayageum), Jungyeong Bang (harp), and composers Soojung Shin (Eclipse I) and Jiyoung Kim (Eclipse II).

*Unlike the traditional 12-stringed gayageum familiar in South Korea, the North Korean gayageum is usually 21-stringed, a reformation made under the influence of Russia in the 1960s and 1970s, when the originally 5-note scale North Korean music expanded to a 7-note scale of Western classical music. The 21-stringed North Korean gayageum shown in Jun’s Eclipse is an instrument of compromise with which the performer can play the vibratos of the 12-string gayageum.

Green Screen unfolds screens (sceneries) that are burning in green. They are furious flames of green, landscapes that actually exist, and deterioration of thought that occurs when faced with the outside world. Depicting landscapes in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), where civilian access has been controlled for 70 years since the Korean War, Green Screen attempts to materialize the reality of North and South Korea’s division – this space full of tension and absurdity. With little human intervention, the DMZ has paradoxically preserved the overwhelming power of nature. In Jun’s video, the fuming landscapes embody “now time” in which the present is interlaced with the past; the artist has combined real and ideal sceneries to superimpose destruction and creation, antagonism and coexistence. While a “green screen” usually refers to a large green background used in video production for digital effects, Jun’s Green Screen presents the DMZ as vivid sceneries rather than a historical background. The glitches added to create the fuming effect in the DMZ’s green landscapes are the artist’s attempt to replace the ambivalent senses involved with the division of the Korean people, such as prolonged frustration and hope, hostility and hospitality, confrontation and coexistence, and destruction and generation. As she explains, glitches are errors that occur in the transformation of data, in the process of displacement, transmission, acceleration, and/or circulation.

Green Screen seeks to transform the DMZ’s image from a Cold War frontier to a symbol of ecology and a real-world utopia where new systems can be imagined. The DMZ currently exists as a border that divides the Korean Peninsula, but Jun imagines the possibility of infinite stories bouncing out of the fraught area.

References

• 리움미술관 (Leeum Museum of Art)