Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Song Min Jung has held solo exhibitions including 《Italic Time》 (Namsan Public Library, Seoul, 2024), 《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).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Song has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 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).

Originality & Identity

Song Min Jung treats intangible states—such as the here-and-now mood and atmosphere—as primary materials, capturing and rearranging images and language that drift along online timelines. Works like DOUBLE DEEP HOT SUGAR - the Romance of Story -(2017), CREAM, CREAM ORANGE(2017), and “Est-ce vraiment nécessaire?”(2017), which appropriate the rhetoric of film/TV teasers and advertising, present “mood” as if it were a service rather than a tangible product, elevating the gimmick—as a trigger of consumer desire—into a central concept and strategy. Here, “time” is handled not as a completed past but as a sensation pressed up against the “present-soon-to-be-past,” and the work exists as an event that appears and vanishes like a pop-up ad or store.

In 2018, the solo exhibition 《COLD MOOD (1000% soft point)》(Tastehouse, 2018) “translated” the moods and narratives assembled online into a physical space, turning the gap between a psychological site (timeline) and a bodily site (gallery) into a task of experience. Viewers moved along a showroom-like setting of perfumes, beverages, and desserts and a tablet “kiosk” itinerary, passing through points where the work’s context dovetailed with the logic of commodities. The curated “feeling” lingered without being fully grasped, and that very slippage of sensation became the core content of the work.

At MMCA’s exhibition 《Young Korean Artists 2019: Liquid, Glass, Sea》, the works Talker(2019) and AKSARA MAYA(2019) introduced first-person vlog and RPG structures to explore the division and generation of a “non-physical self” composed of screen, voice, and text. In the rapidly shifting online environment, identity operates not as a single entity but as a device of multiple accounts, voices, and roles, with the user acting as a “shadow writer” who fine-tunes the narrative.

Since 2020, Wild Seed(2020) and the Busan Biennale work Custom(2022) have expanded the concept toward issues of “erasure/replication of existence” in a datafied society. Vanishing SNS residues (Wild Seed) and a mystery of relations and desire traced through smartphone timelines (Custom) redefine the meaning of “movement” that shuttles across the borders between virtual/real, city/sea, and interior/exterior.
In 2024, the one-day exhibition 《Italic Time》(Namsan Public Library) distributed works such as JOE(2021) and Atmospheres(2023) throughout the library to summon the italic “tilt” of a paragraph as a pocket of time, extending the provisional interval between “after” and “before” into the exhibition itself.

Style & Contents

The artist borrows the mise-en-scène of advertising and fashion campaigns (glossy “skin,” frontal lighting, vertical frame 1080×1920) to package emotions (joy/melancholy) in the “product language” of promotion (CREAM, CREAM ORANGE, DOUBLE DEEP HOT SUGAR - the Romance of Story -). While the message appears to advertise a product, the actual content is the transmission of mood and the immediate switching of affect. This “twist between form and content” is how the gimmick operates.

In spatial composition, showroom displays, table settings, and kiosk interfaces are integrated to unfold viewing as a “use scenario.” Especially in the Tastehouse exhibition, routes that had visitors sniff fragrances, drink beverages, and leave reservations during viewing intersected the work’s context with commodity action, turning viewers into “user-performers.”

In the subsequent work Talker(2019), the narrative structure is segmented and developed through a first-person camera, an AR character (Huff), and multiple voices. AKSARA MAYA(2019) constructs a fictional space by collecting and recombining language like an RPG quest, probing a condition in which the “user,” with no visible body, leaves only psychological statements. This simultaneously enacts a contemporary sensibility in which the body is transposed into screen-data—at the levels of both content (identity) and form (play/quest).

Song Min Jung also adopts an installation strategy that combines multiple small screens (mobile) with site context. Wild Seed visualizes data erasure through thriller conventions, and Custom juxtaposes “personal timelines” via an array of phones. In the solo exhibition 《tandsmør》(Kunsthal Aarhus, 2021), the work Window(2019/2020) layered women’s narratives across different eras and cities, while 《Italic Time》(Namsan Public Library) translated the “italic tilt” between shelves and books into a site-specific rhythm.

Topography & Continuity

Song Min Jung occupies a distinctive position by using an “aesthetics of the gimmick” as a core engine, designing offline experiences alongside online image consumption (“tasting with the eyes”) and converting them across media. Where contemporary post-internet discourse often narrows to platform critique, the artist boldly deploys the idioms of advertising and service design, turning mood/affect into “formal tools” for production and circulation.

In conclusion, the development of her practice to date can be summarized as the capture of image-moods from online timelines (2016–2017); translation into showroom-like spatial/itinerary design (2018); exploration of the non-physical self via first-person/AR/RPG (2019); expansion to data erasure and hybrid narrative (2020–2022); and the creation of temporal margins across exhibition/non-exhibition spaces (2024). Each phase consistently enacts the artist’s stated approach of “using time as a primary medium to modulate the gap between reality and the work.”

In sum, Song Min Jung’s persistence lies in time-based exhibition design that finely calibrates the gap between online/offline and virtual/real through the mediation of “mood-making and distribution.” Her works function less as fixed objects than as “devices that transmit mood,” and the sensitivity with which she adjusts their movement, placement, and tempo continually refreshes the practice. Accordingly, the works take on different cadences depending on place and context, and viewers, following these shifting cadences, re-align their present sensibilities.