Exhibition Information

Landscape of egoism #06
2007 Inkjet print 96x75cm

Landscape of egoism #27
2008 Inkjet print 96x120cm

2019 Archival pigment print on a light box 53x53cm

2016 Digital print 100x100cm

			According to the Cambridge dictionary,‘trace’ is ‘a sign that something has happened or existed’ as a noun and also means ‘to find the origin of something’ as a verb. If an artist, endowed with keen eyes and sensibilities, is destined to stay curious and incessantly question the world, and at the same time, artistically present the world based on his subjective interpretation with exuberant imagination, here are two such contemporary Korean photographers, Jeongeun Jeon and Jipil Jung.

Jeoneun Jeon focuses on the trace of human lives in the world and reveals an aspect of human nature through ‘Landscape of Egoism’(2007-2009). He continues to create landscape which exists only in imagination, by replicating multiple layers using digital process after capturing real landscapes of different times and spaces. In an early work in Jeon’s series, ‘Landscape of Egoism’,  interior space destroyed or artificially manipulated by humans and nature coexist. His works which include mixed images of artifacts and scenes of nature reveal the aspect of egoistic human nature and the irony in the minds of contemporary people who want to be surrounded by nature, but constantly destroy it under the pretext of development. Jeongeun Jeon, in “Landscape of Egoism,” covets the world of Simularq through various visual transformations and plays, as in the world of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), "The reality without the reality, the reality without the reality.”

While Jeongeun Jeon metaphorically unveils one aspect of human nature by aggregating fragments of trace through a very elaborate process, Jipil Jung persistently traces the answers to questions which arise from the etymology of photography, “drawn with lights. “Seeing” is always a physical phenomena of light being reflected by the object, and the origin of light is the sun. That is to say, every phenomenon of the earth is a photographic work drawn by light (photo- light-, graphy- drawing in Greek). ‘Sun’s Selfie’ (2016) is taken from a range of a second to seven days using leaves or marine plants instead of film. Through these works, Jung reminds us that our cognition of the real world should be malleable by showing us continuous shifts of the sun which is the origin of ‘seeing.’ ‘Hotter Sun’(2019) sprang from the question ‘what if the temperature of sun were different?’ Jung imaginatively reorganizes the images of the sun captured by NASA with satellite when it was hotter or colder than now using digital process. <Hotter Sun_Spectra>(2019) is a portrait made from the imagination where not one, but several suns exist, creating a diverse spectrum of individuals intersecting momentarily as the artificial lights corresponding to a sun create various atmospheres.

Everything that exists is bound to leave a trail, and life is a series of endless questions. This is why we pay attention to Jeongeun Jeon, who realizes the dual and egoistic nature of contemporary people through human-made ‘trace,’ and Jipil Jung, who constantly ’traces’ questions and answers about the source of light, and shows that our perception of the world can change with flowing light. We are now passing through a long tunnel in the Pandemic era which no one could have foretold. The virus, Covid-19, is the consequence of our selfish contemporaries. So where is the origin of this virus, and how can we find solutions to the phenomena derived from human egoism? As always, let’s start 2021 with a set of questions and some hope.