Exhibition Information

			‘MoPS Talent Portfolio 2021’ group exhibition showcases the work of two Korean photographers, Seungwon JUNG (1992~ ) and Jihyun JUNG (1983~ ) at MoPS Samcheong for 8 weeks. Set up to seek out and support Korean artists in their 30s and 40s by closely looking into the footsteps of their career. Based in London and Seoul respectively, the two contemporary artists use photography as a key medium of their practice. In spite of different subject matters, their works have points of intersection regarding ideas they work out, means to approach to the concepts and manners they apply photography with an extended viewpoint. This group exhibition represents multilateral and feasible attitude of today’s artists. Seungwon JUNG’s Memories Full of Forgetting (2017~ ) and Bark (2018), both presented in this show, focus on how people perceive memory in context of space. The installation using fabrics and photographic images visualizes layers of memory being distorted, blurred, and rearranged as time passes. JUNG photographed familiar places but nowhere special, and printed fragmental images on fabric. Then she deconstructs the fabric strand by strand as memories slowly disappear. JUNG intends to uncover what we call ‘memory’ is an assembly, apart from the original just like the loosen threads. Jihyun JUNG has focused on urban spaces and the ways in which they change with construction, destruction, and urban developments. He has ventured into construction sites and demolition zones of the New Towns and urban redevelopment project sites and documented them in photographs. This exhibition presents Construction Site (2012), Construct (2017), and his very recent series Reconstruct (2020). All three were done at the new buildings and renovation sites, and look into the course of changes in which the structures and space had undergone at the site. Construction Site is the first series, which he experiments a temporary change to the structures and space at the site with limited access to the public. In both Construct and Reconstruct, JUNG shows his involvement in the site more clearly to uncover the process of construction. All three works are the result of combination of the artist’s direct involvement, which could be read as installation or performance, and photography. The two artists both focus on cycle of memory and space, an intangible subject. It is the key for both to cut down the layers of the cycle and fixate them in an image. They closely look into the hidden layers of the cycle, and expose them in a certain visual form. For Seungwon JUNG, the layers represent the moments of which memories get distorted, blurred and reorganized, and for Jihyun JUNG, the mid-process of constructions, overshadowed by the spectacles of fast-paced cityscapes repeats the instant cycle of construction and demolition. The two artists involve themselves into an image creation process with an attempt to recover and expose the layers in oblivion.