Jaeho Jung, Station, 2009 © Jaeho Jung

In October, Gallery Hyundai Gangnam (Director: Hyungtae Doh) presents a new body of work by Jaeho Jung, an artist who has gained attention for his series depicting old and aging apartment buildings. The exhibition 《Father's Day》 moves beyond the theme of deteriorating architectural structures built long ago and gradually disappearing, which the artist has explored in his previous works. Instead, it focuses on the generation of our fathers, and on spaces and objects that existed within their history but have since vanished from the present.

While developing new works as an extension of his earlier series (Ecstatic Architecture, ‘Apartment’ works), Jung searched through old photographs and began to imagine recreating buildings that no longer exist, or reconstructing existing buildings as they once appeared, based on archival images.
Through the act of summoning the past and translating it once again into painting, the artist seeks to re-present the spaces of his father’s generation, thereby addressing what has been forgotten, erased, or rendered difficult to speak of in the present.

Rather than restoring architectural structures or objects taken from photographs dating from the 1950s to the 1980s as they were, Jung ambiguously situates them within a virtual time-space, using his own editorial decisions and reconstructions informed by various pieces of information about the contexts in which those buildings once existed.


Jaeho Jung, California, 2009 © Jaeho Jung

Through charcoal and acrylic applied to Korean paper, the historical spaces depicted in Jung’s works are sometimes rendered as ruins, diverging from their actual appearances, or reconstructed as virtual spaces composed of multiple combined images.

The old spaces, architecture, and objects presented in this exhibition are not simple reproductions of historical sites, but devices that evoke memories of earlier times. Through them, the artist seeks to reveal other images recalled by the past.

Jung’s work poses questions to contemporary society through his reinterpretation of history. What matters is not the reproduction of the past itself, but what the process of reproducing the past calls forth—for me, for us, for him—here and now, and what that which is called forth means in the present moment.

In a society where the disconnect between the generation of our fathers and our own has deepened, and where questioning the past itself is often avoided, this exhibition offers a valuable opportunity to look back once again at the history of the ground on which we stand.

References