Song
Min Jung, born in Busan graduated from the College of Arts at Konkuk
University. She currently lives and works in Seoul.
Song Min Jung (b. 1985) has pursued a
practice that traces the meaning of “movement” within a world where the
physical and non-physical are intertwined, as a way of perceiving the present.
Rather than asserting fixed or eternal values, she takes the transient—such as
moods, atmospheres, and states of being—as her material, weaving new worlds
across both online and physical spaces.
Song Min Jung’s practice demands shallow
yet rapid immersion and transition, much like the constantly shifting timelines
of social media. She appropriates images drifting through the fast currents of
trends and re-presents them as pop-up ads or pop-up stores, appearing on
familiar screens such as smartphones, TV dramas, or billboards that fill
commercial spaces.
In doing so, she adopts “the gimmick”—a
strategy used in literature or marketing to capture attention, or to describe
something that exceeds its original function—as a central device in her work.
Between 2016 and 2017, Song Min Jung’s
works functioned as a kind of online gimmick. She appropriated the marketing
language of teasers and advertisements from films and television dramas,
creating fictitious brands and presenting intangible products as if they were
real, distributing them across online platforms.
For instance, the series ‘DOUBLE DEEP HOT
SUGAR – the Romance of Story–‘ (2017), circulated through social media
timelines, was a video work inspired by the structure of drama teasers and
promotional clips. It borrowed both the convention of pairing a main title with
a subtitle—often seen in film titles—and the distinctive rhetoric of
advertising.
While the rhetoric of Song Min Jung’s works
seems to promote a product, what the videos actually address are abstract
emotions such as “joy” and “melancholy.” Through these works, she adopts an
attitude of offering a kind of service—consuming images that drift along
timelines or packaging particular moods into shareable forms.
For example, CREAM, CREAM
ORANGE (2017), which originated from beauty advertising imagery,
employs the polished skin aesthetics often found in fashion brand campaigns to
produce a glossy, sleek surface. The artist explains that her mimicry of this
“as-if-most-stylish-in-this-moment” rhetoric is intended to “attach the work
closely to the moment of the present in a world where everything quickly
becomes the past.”
In addition, Song Min Jung established a
fictional dessert brand called ‘Serious Hunger,’ through which she carried out
various activities both online and offline. Existing mainly as an SNS account,
‘Serious Hunger’ drifted across timelines in the form of photos and videos,
much like “a pie in the sky”—no one actually knew where or how to purchase it.
What Song offered through this ghost-like
brand was not desserts as tangible objects, but rather an immaterial entity—a
mood conveyed through their images. The videos of ‘Serious Hunger,’ mostly
styled as commercials, carried narrations such as, “From now on, we will
transmit the mood we propose. We promise to deliver it as precisely as
possible,” or “An intuitive cream instantly improves your mood,” suggesting
that they could transform one’s emotional state.
Serious Hunger,
Opening ceremony of Tastehouse ©TastehouseIn 2017, Song Min Jung staged Ceremony, an
open event at Tastehouse, where she presented desserts—previously accessible
only through timelines—arranged in harmony with flowers and plants in
collaboration with a plant shop. Although the audience could not actually taste
the fictional desserts materialized in physical form, they were able to enjoy
the atmosphere proposed by ‘Serious Hunger’ and engage with the table setting
by experiencing and photographing its various elements in their own ways.
Meanwhile, in her 2018 solo exhibition 《COLD MOOD (1000% soft point)》 at Tastehouse,
the artist relocated her works—previously circulating through online
timelines—into the physical space of the gallery, translating a bodily site and
envisioning pathways through which the works could operate. She produced
perfumes, beverages, and cakes herself, transforming the exhibition space into
a kind of showroom for their purchase.
Installation view
of 《COLD MOOD (1000% soft point)》 ©TastehouseThe artist provided a viewing manual on a
tablet PC, resembling a kiosk menu, and presented works that were activated in
response to the viewer’s movement as they followed the pathways suggested by
the videos, becoming performers of sorts. Through this method, she embedded the
moods generated by mixing multiple media into the narrative, while leaving the
user with nothing but an elusive “feeling” of the experience, never fully
graspable.
At this point, the artist would insert
dissonant flows into the narrative or conceal meaning by linking the context of
the work to a kind of commodity. By setting up routes where viewers might, in
the middle of watching a video, purchase and drink a beverage, sample a
fragrance, or reserve a perfume, she employed strategies that either pressed
close to the user’s psychological space or, conversely, established a sense of
distance.
Such an exhibition intertwined the
experience of consumption—both online and offline—with that of the work itself,
making perceptible the gap between psychological and physical spaces, while
reflecting on the ways people enjoy images and cultivate taste.
Regarding her works that operate through
such online gimmicks, curator Haeju Kim remarked, “They reveal the consumption
and desire of the internet—‘tasting with the eyes’—as well as the gap between
the smartphone screen and actual experience.” She further explained, “Song Min
Jung takes the fleeting image experiences that constantly slip out of our field
of vision online as her material, and employs their very flow as the grammar of
her work.”
Meanwhile, the work Talker
(2019), presented at the 《Young Korean Artists 2019:
Liquid, Glass, Sea》 exhibition of the National Museum
of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), addresses the contemporary
digital self-identity that continuously divides and evolves in the digital
virtual space of the internet by creating another persona like an avatar.
The video develops through the first-person
perspective of a moving body and traces the relationship between the screen and
viewing through language and non-physical relationality. In this work, Song Min
Jung adopts the YouTube vlog storytelling technique, which captures an
individual’s daily life from a first-person perspective.
Song Min Jung,
Talker, Single-channel video, color, sound(stereo), Mixed
media, 25min 52sec., Installation view of 《Young Korean Artists
2019: Liquid, Glass, Sea》 (MMCA, 2019). Photo: Hong
Jin-hwon. ©MMCAIn the vlog-format video, the narrator
converses with an augmented-reality dog, “Huff,” a fictional health management
application, and receives health checks from it. Huff is programmed to develop
a new personality depending on the owner’s (user’s) responses, thereby forming
an identity through this virtual interaction.
Meanwhile, the narrator’s identity remains
ambiguous and is inferred only through the text, images, video, and sound that
compose the screen, rather than a physical body. The narrator’s voice shifts
between female and male, evoking today’s internet users who alter their digital
self-identities across multiple accounts.
Furthermore, in the video work AKSARA
MAYA (2019), the artist adopts the format of an RPG game to explore
the non-physical relationship between body and identity. The work constructs a
fictional space by collecting and recombining language within a world where
game and reality intermingle.
Here, the characters referred to as “users”
function as shadow writers guiding the narrative. However, they too appear in a
non-physical state, without revealing the presence of a body, and rely solely
on psychological statements to encourage viewers to perceive the present more
intimately and personally.
In these works, the body appears in a
“non-physical” form, merged with technology, evoking our existence within a
data-driven society.
Building on this reflection, the video work
Wild Seed (2020) intersects online and offline, virtual and
real, urban spaces and the open sea, prompting a reconsideration of the meaning
of human mortality and the ways in which an individual’s multiple “bodies”
exist in a datafied society.
The video unfolds against the backdrop of
the death of a man named Kim Ki-cheol. As those who were connected to him
refuse to give testimony, even the data left on his social media accounts
during his lifetime is mysteriously and completely erased, causing the
existence of Kim Ki-cheol to vanish from both virtual and real realms.
Through this thriller-like narrative, the
artist emphasizes that human existence in a data-driven society can be easily
transformed or erased, prompting a critical reflection on today’s era of
accelerated technological development.
In 2022, at the Busan Biennale, Song Min
Jung presented the mystery-thriller video work Custom
(2022). In the video, the protagonist Haruko moves to Busan to follow her
husband, a footwear engineer who receives an overseas assignment, when she
turns 23. It is said that at the time, many Japanese engineers were dispatched
to Busan as the result of a joint Korea-Japan partnership dealing with rubber.
One day, Haruko visits the shoe factory
where her husband works and meets Chunja, a worker there, and they are drawn to
one another. Haruko (はるこ, meaning “born in spring” in
Japanese) was born in Kobe in the spring of 1945, while Chunja (春子, meaning “child of spring” in Korean) was born in Busan on the
exact same day. With the same name, meaning “children of spring,” they are born
with a similar fate and recognize a new place by using each other as
coordinates.
Chunja becomes an alleyway into an inner
world for Haruko, while Haruko represents a sea route towards the outside for
Chunja. Custom is a mystery thriller that follows their
smartphone. Song sets up a specific environment through fictional characters
and connects it to the timeline on the smartphone screen.
Through such work, Song Min Jung brings
elements closely tied to the present into her artistic medium or blends
fictional bodies and time to create hybrid timelines. This allows viewers to
observe a hybrid world within the gaps formed between reality and the
constructed setting, tracing the meaning of movement.
Her work addresses the physical and
psychological experiences of contemporary individuals who navigate the
boundaries between online and offline, virtual and real, prompting us to
reconsider our perception of the “present.”
”The key medium I use in my work is
“time.” I press reality and my work very closely together, or deliberately
widen the gap between them.” (Song Min Jung, from the interview of 《Young Korean Artists 2019:
Liquid, Glass, Sea》, MMCA)
Song Min Jung graduated from the College of
Arts at Konkuk University. Her solo exhibitions include 《Atmospheres》 (359-11, Hapjeong-dong, Seoul,
2023), 《tandsmør》 (Kunsthal
Aarhus, Aarhus, 2021), 《COLD MOOD(1000% soft point)》
(Tastehouse, Seoul, 2018), and 《Double
Deep Hot Sugar-The Romance of Story》 (B½F, Seoul,
2016).
She has also participated in numerous group
exhibitions, including 《Italic Time》 (Namsan Public Library, Seoul, 2024), 2022 Busan Biennale 《We, on the Rising Wave》 (Pier 1 of Busan
Port, Choryang, Busan, 2022), 《The Fable Of Net In
Earth》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2022), 《Signaling Perimeters》 (Seo-Seoul Museum of
Art, Seoul, 2021), 2020 Busan Biennale 《Words at an
Exhibition : an exhibition in the chapters and five poem》 (Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, 2020), 《Night Turns to day》 (Art Sonje Center,
Seoul, 2019), and 《Young Korean Artists 2019: Liquid,
Glass, Sea》 (MMCA, Gwacheon, 2019).
