“Centuries in the Distant Mist” Installation view at SeMA Bunker ©Seoul Museum of Art. Photo: Jang Hwal LimFrom June 20 to July 11, the SEMA Bunker, an annex of the Seoul Museum of Art, presents Yeoreum Jeong (b.1994)’s solo exhibition Centuries in the Distant Mist. Yeoreum’s work involves observing the narrative of a point and analyzing how it works, and she especially visualizes stories about the connection between place and memory through video.
This exhibition is part of the Seoul Museum of Art’s ‘Emerging Artists & Curators Supporting Program’ which has been running since 2008. The program aims to give nine selected artists(teams) the opportunity to exhibit at SeMA Storage and SeMA Bunker. Also, it provides exhibition grants and mentoring through matching with museum curators.
The exhibition consists of three video works, < Underground Bank > (2023), < The Silent Bearers > (2023), which she shot while traveling between Korea and Vietnam, and her previous work < To a natural Witness > (2021). The works illuminate tragic points of the war, such as the Israeli assault on Gaza and the war trauma of Vietnamese people. Through these works, she draws attention to the relationship between events, places, and memory. The exhibition creates a new context by utilizing the fact that SeMA Bunker was a secret security facility built under the military regime in the 1970s. In this way, the exhibition draws the viewer’s attention to the process by which an event can take on a different meaning over time, just as the trauma and debris of war can be consumed as a tourist product.
