NYAB Event - Sojung Jun “Forget This Night When the Night Is No More”

Sojung Jun “Forget This Night When the Night Is No More”

Doosan Gallery

This event has ended.

In this exhibition, three older and two newer video works will be shown. Time Regained (2012), which is based on the life of a sign painter, A Day of A Tailor (2012), which portrays the daily life of a tailor of forty years, and Last Pleasure (2012), a piece that depicts the essence of art and the artist through a tight ropewalker, will be exhibited. Through the stories of a piano tuner and a female shellfish diver, in the two new works The Twelve Rooms (2014) and Treasure Island (2014), Jun metaphorically shows the world that surrounds artists, as well as the ideal that they are seeking. These two video works form an interesting pairing in the exhibition, thereby going back and forth within the boundary of east and west, outside and inside, masculine and feminine, and the rational and the irrational.

The figures that appear in Sojung Jun’s works are everyday professionals whose desire is for their art and life to not be separated and rather mixed together in harmony, but because of the practical issues in society, they experience a severing. Therefore, their lives are like a tight ropewalker, nervously balancing between the two sides of everyday and art, ideal and reality. Through the lives of these people, Jun reveals the contrast between tradition and the present, labor and art, imitation and creation, and reality and idea, and looks at the boundaries that separate them, and it is through the lives of these people that the artist attempts to show the struggles and problems of artists, as well as characteristics to aspire towards.

The title of the exhibition, “Forget This Night When the Night Is No More,” is a quotation from Tagore’s poem “Gardener.” “Night” in the title refers to the past, as well as the labor and hand that have maintained society, and the artistic world of master crafts people. The title also suggests that although their night ends in solitude, their lives must be remembered.