Installation view of 《Olwookeok–geoggurogeogguro》 (SONGEUN Art Cube, 2019) © SONGEUN

Lee Jungwoo has explored the mechanisms through which fictional perceptions and images are received through popular culture and media, particularly cinema. By dismantling and recombining the elements that constitute film, he creates empty parentheses between images and perceptions that have already become firmly fixed.

In his 2017 solo exhibition 《Shot Blank》(Art Sonje Center, 2017), Lee dismantled the conventional mechanisms of Korean horror cinema and presented moving images composed of imagery from which the narratives of horror films had been removed. The locations appearing in the works came from location-scouting archives compiled for horror-film production.

Even without the narratives ordinarily supplied by cinema, these locations still evoke the familiar phantoms of fear associated with horror films. This relates to the homonymous Korean title “Shot Blank,” referring to a blank cartridge that causes fear without inflicting direct physical violence.

The moving-image work presented in this exhibition begins with fragments of past narratives already embedded within it. Historical remnants may still be preserved in tangible form or continue to operate within everyday life as intangible presences. The 2019 work presents an incomplete body and the viewpoint of a filming drone that resists it.

In the video, a drone circles a body that may once have been intended as a monument to someone considered honorable or great, but which was never completed as such. “Die Resistenz” means “resistance” in German, and the drone’s movement appears to repel and slip away from the object like two north poles of magnets meeting.

At the same time, it resembles an elegant waltz—a “Tanz,” or act of dancing. Events of the past recorded in the future are reorganized in multiple ways. In fact, events that we believe to be unquestionably real are perhaps closer to things that were never recorded as entirely objective and precise facts.

Lee Jungwoo, The Golden Age of Grave Robbing - Chapter 3. Olwookeok, 2019, 3-channel video installation (synchronized), color, sound, HD, 4min 44sec. (loop) © SONGEUN

The Golden Age of Grave Robbing is a three-channel video work that deals with places that were once centers where all power in an era converged, but which today remain only as traces of historical existence. In The Golden Age of Grave Robbing, Chapter 1, royal tombs and wooden frameworks appear, from the perspective of the present, like images whose inner substance has been lost, leaving only their shells behind.

Throughout the video are news reports involving particular politicians and recordings of politicians’ voices played backward. Actors who have portrayed historical figures discuss how they reenacted those figures, alongside footage showing them performing historical characters.

The work dismantles scenes from the films The Mummy (1932), The Goonies (1985), and Bi Xie Jien (1981), recombining and rearranging them in different ways. While watching the video, it becomes difficult to distinguish whether a scene is progressing forward along the narrative timeline or moving backward. The elements that normally enable visual interpretation—images, sounds, subtitles—are inverted and mixed together.

In stitching together scenes moving backward and forward, the narratives of the original films are dismantled or sometimes become legible as unexpected new narratives. This resembles the very structure through which we perceive events from a past timeline that has itself been rearranged.

The exhibition title 《Olwookeok–geoggurogeogguro》 was created by reversing the word “geogguro” (“backward” or “in reverse”) according to its phonemes, the smallest phonological units, and adding the initial consonant “ㅇ.” When the word “geogguro” is separated and reversed, its original meaning is dismantled.

The devices that Lee disassembles and overlays onto each scene disturb our perception of things belonging to the past, things that actually existed, and the representation and documentation of the past.

Through this exhibition, viewers are invited to fill the empty parentheses inserted by the artist around questions of how images perceived through media function as channels within social mechanisms, and how trajectories of the past are reorganized and recorded.

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