Sojung Jun / Pernod Ricard Fellow 2016

Sojung Jun (South Korea, 1982) received a BFA in Sculpture from Seoul National University and an MFA from Yonsei University. She is known for her video and per­for­mance art­works. Sojung Jun has been intrigued by the con­cept of time and the repet­i­tive expe­ri­ence of emo­tion in our life. She takes the life sto­ries of indi­vid­uals she comes across and retells them as part of her work through stage plays, per­for­mances and nar­ra­tives using ancient texts as ref­er­ence. One of her solo exhi­bi­tions, One Man Theater, which was shown in Sungkyun Gallery in Seoul in 2009, demon­strates Jun’s interest in pro­ducing a series of related shots that con­sti­tute a com­plete unit of action. In her series Daily Experts, ongoing since 2009, she seeks to mull over life and art by con­fig­uring the exclu­sive tempo, lan­guage, colors, sounds and editing for video works in an inte­grated manner.

STATEMENT OF INTENT

"In 2014, I col­lab­o­rated with a piano tuner for my work The Twelve Rooms. I used his repeated tuning sounds to create a music piece, and added a par­tic­ular color tone to the sounds. Inspired by let­ters exchanged between Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, I wanted to explore more diverse phe­nomena linked to synes­thesia, beyond the color-sound rela­tions. My con­cern lied in the fun­da­mental point of how to share this spe­cial and indi­vidual expe­ri­ence deemed as a patho­log­ical or abnormal phe­nomenon, which led to curiosity in how each of the indi­vidual expe­ri­ences could be chan­neled into art­works.

The Twelve Rooms trig­gered a new cor­re­spon­dence between curator Sohyun Ahn and myself, through which we tried to unveil the secrets of synes­thesia. We notably dis­cussed graphemic synes­thesia (sensing images from alphabet shapes) in Voyelles, by poet Arthur Rimbaud; color audi­tions in Alexander Scriabin’s music piece, Promethée, Le Poème du feu; and trans­po­si­tions of forms and senses in Thomas Bernhard’s novel Alte Meister. We explored such notions as Roman Jakobson’s “metonymy”, which con­nects objects with no seeming causality by the force of dif­fer­ences; and Gilles Deleuze’s “dif­fer­ences” and “in­ten­sity”. We were inter­ested in synes­thesia as a prin­ciple for cre­ating art­works, and as a method­ology to create and appre­ciate art­works. Our set of artistic ref­er­ences trig­gered the desire for a deeper inves­ti­ga­tion into the way synes­thesia has been explored in Europe, espe­cially in France.

During an ear­lier, short stay in France in 2012, I was charmed by Louis Aragon’s novel Le Paysan de Paris. The book attempts to col­lect and give form to a changing city through indi­vidual, non-causal ele­ments. As I am cur­rently preparing a new work to pro­pose an alter­na­tive view of Seoul as phys­i­cally torn apart by neo-lib­eral devel­op­ment pro­jects nation­wide, I would like to tap onto Le Paysan de Paris and synes­thesia as cre­ative prin­ci­ples."

Image: Sojung Jun, The Twelve Rooms, 2014, 7’35”, single channel video, stereo sound, color, HD. Courtesy: Sojung Jun.