”Jung Youngsun: For All That Breathes On Earth” Installation view. Photo: Jung Jihyun. ©MMCA
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) presents “Jung Youngsun: For All That Breathes On Earth” through September 22 at Seoul branch
The exhibition retraces the life and work of Korea’s first-generation landscape architect Jung Youngsun (1941~), spanning a half century of dedicated landscape practice, from the time of her graduate studies in the 1970s to her current projects. Most of the archives of the landscape architect’s sixty large and small projects will be on display for the first time, bringing together in one place more than 500 archival materials, including pastel, pencil, and watercolor drawings, blueprints, design schemes, models, photographs, and videos. By presenting a selection of Jung Youngsun’s representative works by the me, the exhibition aims to reveal the contexts, concerns, and artistic undertakings behind the design of natural environments in urban spaces, and to return these considerations and philosophies, beyond the function of landscape architecture, to the story of all of us who pursue a life in harmony with nature.
The exhibition reconstructs Jung’s oeuvre according to the subject matter and nature of the works, which includes state-led public projects, gardens and resorts commissioned by private companies, arboretums, and botanical gardens that study and preserve plants, and monumental landscapes as methodologies for writing history. This approach, which eschews chronological and/or linear narrative, is in keeping with modern Korean history, which is characterized by simultaneous processes of economic development and democratization. At the same time, it also shows how countless different types of works are all grounded within what Jung has emphasized as “the context of earth’s history.”
New gardens will be created for the exhibition in the outdoor Jongchinbu Madang and the sunken garden Gallery Madang of the MMCA Seoul. The beauty of the stone mountain, Inwangsan will be recreated inside and outside the museum, and native Korean plants that add a sense of the changing seasons will be planted, providing visitors with a place to rest as well as an opportunity to experience the landscape architect’s work with all five senses. In addition, in order to create a multi-dimensional presentation of the over 500 landscape design archival materials featured in the indoor exhibition, a video installation by Giraffe Pictures (Jung Dawoon, Kim Jongshin), which calls attention to the “temporality” of landscape architecture, and landscape photographs by photographers such as Jung Jihyun, Yang Haenam, Kim Yongkwan, and Shin Kyungsup, etc. will also be introduced.
