It is likely that responses to 《MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2023: Jung Yeondoo – One Hundred Years of Travels》 (hereafter 《One Hundred Years of Travels》) will vary. Since the works that introduced Yeondoo Jung in the 2000s took the form of staged photography or photo/video installations that constructed certain scenes while revealing the sets or devices behind them, many may find this new body of work—inflected with historical and documentary narratives—unfamiliar or new. On the other hand, some may sense a certain continuity in the aspect of staging or in the adaptation of ordinary people’s stories. To gauge how this exhibition connects within the overall trajectory of Jung’s practice, and to assess the dynamics of continuity and disjunction, is in fact to determine the significance of this exhibition.
 
The central leitmotif running through all the works in 《One Hundred Years of Travels》(2023) is the migration of Koreans to Mexico in the early twentieth century. The artist encountered descendants of Korean immigrants in Mexico celebrating Liberation Day and was deeply intrigued by how elements that seemed entirely unrelated were connected across time and space. Recalling that the century plant (baeknyeoncho), so common in Jeju that it is sold as a local specialty, originated in Mexico and crossed the Pacific to settle in Jeju, the artist conceived the theme of a hundred-year journey of people and plants linking Korea and Mexico.
 
This is not the first exhibition in which an interest in historical realities such as migration, immigration, colonialism, and labor is evident. During a residency in France in 2015, the artist created Between Here and There(2015), focusing on immigrants of diverse ethnic backgrounds living in the region. Through this process, he became attentive to issues of otherness, migration, and immigration. Such interests began to coalesce around East Asian regionality with Girl in High Heels(2018), first presented at the Hong Kong Heritage Arts Centre.

The story of an elderly woman surnamed Moon who stowed away to Hong Kong at age 23 in 1958 intersects with the lives of ordinary young women who were 23 in 2017, reconstructing Hong Kong’s modern and contemporary history—entwined with labor and industry—through individual life narratives. Subsequently, in Classics and New Works(2018), commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the testimony of an elderly man describing bombing damage during World War II is connected with contemporary elementary school classes and a rakugo performance recounting Tokyo’s past and traditional folktales, bringing together different times and histories of the same place.

The point at which figures and stories from different times and spaces connect is likewise present in One Hundred Years of Travels. The structure of the exhibition—composed of five works—extends the artist’s recent strategy of interweaving similar or divergent narratives across time and space into a spatial dimension. Beyond the narrative of the Korean diaspora in Mexico, it connects stories of foreigners of various nationalities living in Korea in 2023 and the imperialist agreements surrounding the machete, a principal tool of plantation labor. Whereas the crossing of stories was once confined within a single work, here the respective narratives are loosely linked before and after one another within the exhibition space, materializing outside the individual works.
 
Formally as well, One Hundred Years of Travels reveals echoes of earlier works. Generational Portraits(2023), which places parents and children of Korean descent facing one another, recalls Six Points(2010) in its position between photography and video, and Girl in High Heels in its two-channel structure that juxtaposes two different generations. However, unlike Generational Portraits, where the two generations are contrasted visually, in Girl in High Heels each channel is divided by narrative rather than image, and its fan-shaped installation structure emphasizes loose connection over contrast.

The eponymous work One Hundred Years of Travels, which recounts the history of Korean immigration through pansori, gidayū-bunraku, and mariachi performances, may evoke Noise Quartet(2019) in that it narrates modern and contemporary Asian history through voices from different countries. Yet whereas in Noise Quartet one sound corresponds to one story, in One Hundred Years of Travels the songs attach different voices to a single narrative—the life of a Korean immigrant. The forms of the past leave traces in the new work, yet shift trajectory and are varied into another song.

The theme of historical reality may, on the surface, appear distant from earlier works that utilized the media possibilities of photography and film to blur the boundary between fiction and reality. However, the two are fundamentally connected in terms of communication and empathy. In early works such as Bewitched(2001) and mid-career works such as Handmade Memories(2008), the most important element was listening attentively to the stories of ordinary people and making them visible or creating a space for communication.

Although this realization of dreams or memories might be described as the materialization of the virtual, the dreams Jung addresses are closer to a better reality than to fantasy. In that dreams aspire toward a more ideal reality and memories are adaptations of the real, Jung’s virtual has always been firmly rooted in the true stories of real people. What interests him are the ways of life of the people he meets through the occasion of dreams, and the relationships and communication formed in that process. In this sense, his work might also be described as relational art. History is based on reality, yet fiction intervenes in the process of weaving its warp and weft. Fiction and reality are not separate but interconnected.
 
The key mechanism that allows viewers to traverse the boundary between reality and imagination is staging. The story of Korean immigrants who left Korea and arrived in Mexico is staged in the narrative composition that unfolds like a round, but what stands out in 《One Hundred Years of Travels》 is the spatial staging that draws the audience into an imagined story. Staging is a core concept applied to all of Jung’s works; they may be summarized as constructed tableaux. Stage direction had already been employed in earlier works such as Documentary Nostalgia(2007) and Cine Magician(2009).

These works simultaneously present the staged set and the filmed video, exposing the sleight of hand of representational devices that create illusion and intermingling the illusory space of video with the physical space of reality. However, this exhibition marks the first time that stage direction, in terms of spatial installation, has appeared prominently on both macro and micro levels in the overall exhibition composition and in the installation of individual works. In particular, the concept importantly applied here is that of the layer. The notion of layers that confer and construct depth in space was experimentally explored in pioneering fashion in multi-layered photographic installations such as Bird-B Camera(2013) and Between Here and There, yet in this exhibition the concept of layers extends beyond individual works to encompass the entire space.

The circulation path of the five-part exhibition recalls the structure of an opera, symphony, or ballet. If Imaginary Song(2023), realized in the Seoul Box as the overture, functions as a prelude, then the first three parts in Gallery 5 correspond to Acts I, II, and III, and the final part, Wall of Blades(2023), forms the postlude. Considering that the direct treatment of Korean migration to Mexico appears in the central sections (Parts 2–4), while Imaginary Song and Wall of Blades at the beginning and end expand and universalize the central theme through other narratives of migrant labor, the analogy of prelude and postlude—independent yet organically connected to the main composition—aptly corresponds to this exhibition layout. The concept of layers that construct scenes applies not only to the exhibition structure but also intimately to individual works.

 Generational Portraits separates the layers of parent and child generations to create distance, conveying the historical and cultural gap between them. Due to the installation structure, viewers physically positioned between the parent and child generations alternately gaze at the faces of two figures who appear strangely similar yet different. The dissonance between resemblance caused by heredity and difference resulting from hybridity of lineage and culture is suggested by the distance between the two screens. Meanwhile, in Imaginary Song and One Hundred Years of Travels, the concept of layering is articulated not only through image but also through sound. In Imaginary Song, super-directional speakers separate high and low frequencies to construct layers of sound.

In One Hundred Years of Travels, by adopting the structure of an opera house in which orchestra pit and stage are divided, three monitors are installed before the audience seating with a central screen placed behind them, reproducing the spatial position of the sound source. One Hundred Years of Travels distinguishes the three-channel video—the source of sound—from the audience area and central screen, and in terms of image also forms layers of light. Color filters inserted into the central video cast various hues upon white cactus sculptures and white beanbags, staging a theatrical space.

Historical documentary and dream (fiction) meet through staging that continually reconstructs the story via adapted sets, even as they are based on real events. While inheriting previous concerns in terms of communication and staging, One Hundred Years of Travels undertakes new challenges in mode of realization and composition, ultimately achieving a significant leap. One looks forward to seeing how experimentation with media and reflection on historical narratives will merge to construct more complex and multilayered tableaux, and how far the boundaries of empathy envisioned by the artist might expand.

References

• [비평] 정연두 작업의 연속과 분절에 대하여
  [Critique] On Continuity and Disjunction in Yeondoo Jung’s Work