Photographs of Yeondoo Jung evoke warmth, presenting positive energy to viewers through simple pleasure and splendor imbued within. Rather than presenting images by putting different subjects together, Jung attempts to represent the relationships brought up amongst the subjects, and sentiments or dreams that are held by them, which becomes the quintessence of his “constructed photography.”
Therefore, Jung’s photos can be distinguished from those of Jeff Wall that revive the pictorial structure into the context of modern life or those of Pierre & Gilles that create spectacular fantasy with impersonation of Cleopatra or naval forces. Especially, the works of the latter hold their signature character that lives in the artificial paradise, so called “Pierre & Gilles Land,” which emanates unique radiance.
There is no such a “signature character” (or a creature) in the photos of Yeondoo Jung. He employs photography, a medium that transcends real and the pictorial realms, and use it as a catalyst to form a relationship with the subject or with the society. As a result, he elevated photography to a higher level such that its pictorial realm ends up having dynamic influence on the real world. All different dreams can be simulated with visual images in the realm of fantasy: photography can also become a magical tool that change a pumpkin into a horse carriage with a single stroke of magic wand away.
“In information society, ‘pseudo-environment’ generated by the mass media came to achieve a relative significance against real society due to an increasing internal transmission and influences of the mass media on each and every individual. If not a schizophrenia in its narrow definition, however, people tend to misplace the boundary between the realm of reality and the fantasy: and due to their utopian and autistic thinking, people tend to transcend the boundary between the world they indirectly experience through the mass media and the society that they actually live in.”
(Social System and Psychological Disorder, 1971, by Oda Shin, Sociopsychologist)
Yeondoo Jung actively yet positively uses the risky influence of the media that the psychologists warn about. Jung’s recent work BeWitched is a series of “constructed photos,” which is an embodiment of future dreams of young people he met on the streets of Seoul and other Asian cities. Their dreams and fantasies are all varied. Jung suggests this diversity by juxtaposing the scene from their daily lives with their dream-come-true images with the same postures.
A girl working at a fast food restaurant is standing a bit askew with a mop in front of the store counter, and she is shown in the same pose with a spear, ready to go hunting on a dog-pulled sled on the Arctic ice. A boy standing next to a gas pump at the gas station is transformed into a car racer holding a trophy that he won in a Formula 1 car race. A beautiful lady wearing a red coat is standing in front of an upscale store, and next to which, she is in a setting where surrounded by children in a suburban household. The artist worked on these photos with very refined observation and respect for each individual’s daily lives and stories, which is the reason why the simple dream of the beautiful lady and other’s dream-come-true stories can be very real and refreshing despite the banality of its nature.
A dream-like and somewhat comic style of Jung’s photos where people’s dreams can become a true with a stroke of witch’s magic wand counter-use ‘the transcendence of the boundary between the world that people have contact with through the media and the world of real life,’ and at the same time, the “transcendence” and “loss” is now become a self-controllable procedure through collaborating process between the artist and the models.
Things that are banal, routine, and ordinary are no longer restricted under the frame of the original adjectives, and instead they are dispersed into the purity of life, just like the pure ordinary life. The people in the photos shine through as if they were heroes, which is attributable to the production process of Jung. The photos have the power stimulating the reality that transcends the boundary between the lost reality and the false image in the reverse direction.
What would be the figuration? What is being symbolized by somebody else? What is the fundamental relationship between representing somebody’s story visually and picturing someone in a portrait? Jung’s photo works seem to answer to these fundamental questions with his unique sincerity and sensitivity.
For example, with the comparison between the series such as Yanagi Miwa’s Brand Mother and BeWitched from the perspectives that the future told by somebody else is revived as constructed photos, the brevity of Jung’s methodology is clarified to some degree. Yanagi’s work is based on the interview with a young woman asking about the ‘future’ ? what kind of grandmother that she wants to be when she gets old. Based on her answer, sentences and a scene are composed in a photo. Yanagi’s photos show an intense adoption of “intrinsic nature” of photography that detains and registers the subject.
The quality of Jung’s work comes from fact that the imaginary status comes to overlap with joy and it does not look artificial at all but extremely natural. The premise of the question is that it supports the question.
In a way, this is not the externalization of the subjects’ dreams, but it is a nature that deeply-rooted within themselves. Furthermore, they already live the lives of their imaginary creature, and it is the expression of the fantasy. As there is no ideology whatsoever in the transformation, it is an approach to the delicacy and humanity that visualizes small wishes, which anyone has during the day or which are similar to routine mumbles, difficult to express aloud.
I would like to go back to the surprising experience when I encountered his work for the first time in the Gwangju Biennale. It was a wallpaper to be posted on the wall of a dance hall. The patterns shown in Jung’s work were not usual ones found in dance hall but had the images of a couple dancing together wearing social dance attire, symbolized as a tuxedo and beautiful dress. Moreover, it was not a photo of good-looking men and women in the verdure of youth, but a photo of ordinary people of various age groups from middle to old age.
Yeondoo Jung invited the people from a dance club and took photos of them. He went through rather formal process in portraying them in his work as a coin of showing his truthful respect to those people.
Jung also invited the people to the exhibition hall, where a mirror ball was hung from the ceiling and the walls covered with bright-colored wallpaper, and held a dance party. He also hosted the same project in the subway in the downtown of Seoul: he set up a place where people who travel by the subway can join freely and dance away.
Jung took the initial idea of his work from a Japanese movie, Shall we dance? (directed by Suo Masayuki). In the movie, an ordinary salary-man begins to take dance lessons, and through which he comes to learn how to emancipate his suppressed feelings and emotions for his life.
Having inspired by the heartfelt passion of everyday people toward dance, he became create the series of work Boramae Dance Hall.
Jung states that we can witness indication of people’s when they dance as couples, which is not as evident as in solo dancing. The heroic moment of an ordinary man in his daily lives can be pre-determined by the art of dancing and a life-style associated with it.
‘The heroic features in daily lives’ found in Jung’s works have evolved from the dancers to street performers, and then to karate masters.
The latter ones are featured in Jung’s video installation where a karate master in white vest demonstrating such karate movements as “Kata” and “Shadow Fighting”: the video features the master’s heroic moment, as well as his usual yet tired and vulnerable self after the Karate practice.
The very short heroic moment can be translated into a moment with heart throbbing.
Jung’s supple way of thinking and cheerfulness is well-manifested in his recent work with kindergarteners. The children tend to draw what they likes and their dreams onto the picture without pre-conception or hesitation, and sometimes they incorporate undecipherable images in their drawings which have the ‘heart-throbbing’ elements in it.
Firstly, Jung read through the children’s pictures with his suppleness and candidness, and then he reconstructs them into his photo works with his own choreography, which eventually rendered a sphere of wide-open implications.
For example, there is a black and white painting that presents a rectangular house in the middle and two short-haired people in trousers holding hands pleasantly: and the very next to them, there is a flower garden, and some people and a stonewall surround the house.
This picture can be interpreted in multiple ways; however Jung interpreted and constructed the photo in such way as a composition of a gay couple’s wedding, a child stretching himself while sitting on the flower path, and women in black with facial expressions of mixed emotions, such as curiosity and blessing.
The scene describes a moment that can happen in daily lives, and it is a totally different yet delightful world, unlike the customs, moral or any other existing stories. Seeing the children’s paintings would make viewers feel so pleasantly relieved and liberated that they can throw away all the “adjectives” that makes their lives seem so insignificant to an outer space located in zillion light-years away.
A painting that the sun and people are scattered into various directions were interpreted as a person who is jumping freely on the surface of a sea. A scene that can be found in nowhere but in the imagination of children is now granted with illumination and life through Jung’s creative process. The aptness and exuberance, his insightful observations, and the balanced energy that are crystallized visually in stylish manner are the most phenomenal quality of Yeondoo Jung as an artist.
By choreographing each individual’s life into his photos, Jung represents them as subjects, objectifies them, and comes back to reality, drastically charging the power of emotions.
The works that manifests his observant quality as an urban anthropologist are Evergreen Tower in which a family living in a typical rented-apartment in Seoul was portrayed at the same angle in each room, and Tokyo Brand City, a rather stylish photo of salesperson at a fashion shop in Tokyo seen from an outside the window.
Within the pre-arranged settings, these works show the differences or characteristics derived from daily lives in such an ephemeral and delicate manner. Jung represents turbulent emotions of people by eliciting implicit mumbles or desires of people trapped in their imaginations: and what triggers this the most would be by adopting the notion of ‘heroicness’. We certainly know that it is a facet of “actuality,” not so different from what is described by Charles-Pierre Baudelaire of Paris as early as in the 19th century.
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