Sojung Jun (b. 1982) has drawn inspiration from the stories of individuals she encounters, focusing on the voices of individuals hidden behind history and society and exploring how transitions in physical boundaries affect their lives. She reconstructs narratives borrowed from interviews, historical materials, and classical texts through video language and writing. 

The artist pays particular attention to individuals standing on the boundaries within the ruins of modernity, as well as to invisible values and landscapes, intertwining them with her own experiences. Through her unique narratives, she constructs a nonlinear sense of time and space, revealing the aesthetic and political dimensions embedded in the lives of individuals.

Sojung Jun's early works are rooted in the lives of individuals she has encountered. For instance, Three Ways to Elis (2010) traces the life of a dancer who spent nearly 50 years building her own house and living a life of her choosing, as told through those who knew her. 

This work became a turning point for Jun, prompting her to deeply reflect on what it means to live a self-determined life, the attitude of an artist, and the relationship between art and the public. These considerations led to the creation of her Everyday Experts series, a collection of 12 video works documenting the lives of individuals who pursue their ideals while living as "experts of the everyday." 

The first work in this series, The Old Man and The Sea (2009), was inspired by an old man Jun met during her stay in Finland, who taught her how to fish. Through this work, Jun illuminates a seemingly mundane fragment of daily life, revealing the steadfast inner world of the individual.

The artist has encountered various “everyday experts,” including fishermen, piano tuners, haenyeo (female divers), and machine embroiderers. While their professions may not traditionally fall within the realm of art, the artist discovered an artistic attitude in the way these individuals relentlessly push themselves toward the ideals they have created for their lives. 

The artist views these “everyday experts,” who possess a resolute inner world and a philosophy of life, as standing on the boundary between art and everyday life. Created in 2012, Last Pleasure features a tightrope walker whose life vividly embodies this boundary. In the tightrope walker’s existence, the tangible reality on the ground and the lofty ideals of the air are distinctly separated by the fine line of the rope. While the protagonist is ridiculed as a clown in reality, he experiences boundless joy and exhilaration when standing on the rope.

Sojung Jun reflects on the act and attitude of creating art as an artist through the lives of these individuals, a contemplation that culminates in The Habit of Art (2012). This work consists of seven video pieces that repeat simple episodes and photographic works of symbolic images featured in the videos. 

The series begins with a video showing the image of a bird emerging from flames, reborn from the ashes of a blackened fire. Other videos depict actions such as arduously filling a bottomless jar with water, carefully stacking matchsticks layer by layer, capturing the reflection of the moon on water, mesmerizing viewers with glass bead tricks, fearlessly leaping through flaming hoops, and precariously walking on a narrow balance beam. These scenes are presented in a minimalist, repetitive manner, emphasizing their simplicity and resonance.

However, the moment we become aware of the unseen individual enabling these visually simple and repetitive acts, the endlessly looping videos begin to reveal layers of complex narratives. The seemingly reckless yet resolute actions in the videos evoke the lives of the “everyday experts” the artist has encountered, seamlessly connecting their stories into a singular visual narrative. 

Through this approach, Sojung Jun microscopically examines individual lives, observing the intersection of art and life or reconstructing and recording the small, seemingly insignificant stories of individuals hidden within the backdrop of vast social structures. 

Subsequently, the artist began to focus on those existing in the margins, left outside the sphere of modernization. Modernity is a time-space dominated by national identity, rationality, acceleration, and capitalism. Jun directs her gaze toward those who stand at the boundaries of this modernized time and space.

One such work, La Nave de Los Locos (The Ship of Fools) (2016) departs from the 1984 released novel of the same name by the Uruguay-born refugee novelist, poet, translator and author Christina Peri Rossi. If Peri Rossi’s novel derives from her self-awareness of her meson-like identity formed through her experiences as an asylum seeker, a woman, and a homosexual, Jun’s video is an attempt to insert the novel’s storyline into current context.

The video unfolds around a text written in the form of an imaginary letter addressed to Peri Rossi, invoking individuals like refugees who are forced to move due to involuntary circumstances. Alongside this, the artist weaves her sensory impressions of an unfamiliar city experienced as an outsider, as well as her personal accounts of boundaries and movement.

While working on this project, Sojung Jun stayed in Barcelona, where she met Juan Casoliva, a visually impaired dancer. Juan suggested that she experience visual impairment herself. Accepting this proposal, the artist navigated the city with a cane, blindfolded, relying solely on touch to sense and experience her surroundings.

This sensory experience evolved into a practice of indirectly perceiving and sharing the invisible, as seen in works like La Nave de los Locos (The Ship of Fools). In this piece, the sound of a young person skateboarding through the city is combined with the sound of waves, allowing viewers to sense the precarious existence of refugees drifting across the Mediterranean.

Her encounter with Juan inspired Sojung Jun to explore the potential of senses such as hearing, smell, and touch to reveal the invisible. In a modern culture predominantly centered on vision, these non-visual senses, often diminished or overlooked, act as mediators in her work, traversing the boundary between the visible and the invisible.

The video Interval. Recess. Pause. (2017) is a piece about three Korean adoptees the artist met during her residency at the Villa Vassilieff- Pernod Ricard Fellowship in France. The video alternates between testimonials of the adoptees of their memories and choreographer Olivia Lioret’s interpretative moves of the excerpts from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book Dictée (1982).

The childhood memories of adoptees exist not as clear images but as fragments of non-visual senses such as sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations. In this work, Sojung Jun reconstructs their fragmented memories—intertwined with various sensory experiences—through a nonlinear arrangement of collective and personal images and sounds that span different times and spaces. 

Thus, Interval. Recess. Pause. emerges as a collection of diverse sensory experiences, reflecting the amorphous nature of their memories. It invites the imagination to dwell within the gaps of their irreproducible recollections.

Meanwhile, the 2020 video work Eclipse I, II questions the sensory experiences and emotions evoked by the division and borders of the Korean Peninsula in the present day. This work, inspired by composer Isang Yun's Double Concerto, which uses the Korean folktale of Gyeonwoo and Jiknyeo (two lovers separated by the Milky Way) as a metaphor for the relationship of North and South Korea, explores the psychological and physical boundaries of people still living in a divided situation, using sound and imagery.

Eclipse I, II is a two-channel video created based on performances of two pieces composed for the 12-stringed North Korean gayageum and harp. The project was a collaboration with gayageum player Soona Park (North Korean gayageum), harpist Jungyeong Bang, and composers Soojung Shin (Eclipse I) and Jiyoung Kim (Eclipse II).

Playing with the dizzying intersections of horizontal and vertical lines of the string instruments and the performers’ fingers, Jun’s videos create equally dizzying montages of images that constantly slide and fragment. In the midst of disorienting encounters of angles and viewpoints, they also capture fleeting, ephemeral points of accord.

The video work Syncope (2023), first presented at the "Korea Artist Prize 2023" exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, portrays the journey of diaspora crossing physical boundaries in an accelerated modern society, expressed in the form of complex sensory experiences. The video moves along the trajectory of sounds, such as the vibrations of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the sounds of different languages, and the ruptures of musical notation beyond traditional scores.

The video unfolds around the diaspora journey of female instrument players Celia and Soona Park, who have appeared in previous works. The train's vibrating sound evokes the accelerationism of modernity, but this is subverted by the nonlinear sounds of the diaspora's performances, which cross mental and physical boundaries.

In this work, Sojung Jun overlaps the modern speed of trains crossing Asia and Europe, the physical speed of bodies crossing borders, the speed of data, and the ecological speed of moving plants, considering the world of acceleration that spans the past, present, and future, and the practices of those who disrupt it, through the movement of sound.

The artist focuses on the nomadic identity of transformation and mutation, emphasizing the practices of boundary-crossing entities that cannot be confined within existing classifications or institutional norms. She imagines a platform for these boundary-crossing existences and deviates from the linear path of modernity.

Sojung Jun has consistently focused on voices and landscapes of individuals omitted in the process of modernization. She explores ways of writing history that do not erase diversity and difference, seeking her own language in the process. To this end, she shares her questions with collaborators from various fields, presenting her reflections in complex sensory forms. Her work brings a new awareness of history and the present.

“What I have been interested in is ‘the things that happen at the borders’ and their ambiguity, (…) I take a deep affection in rewriting the stories, time, and landscapes of individuals that were omitted within the speed of the city.”

Sojung Jun has received her BFA in Sculpture from Seoul National University and MFA in Media Art from the Graduate School of Communication & Art at Yonsei University. Jun has held solo and group exhibitions at a number of institutions including National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Seoul Museum of Art, Kunstmuseum Bern, Nam June Paik Art Center, Atelier Hermès, ARKO Art Center, Palais de Tokyo, Villa Vassilieff, 11th Gwangju Biennale, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Leeum Samsung Museum.

She is the recipient of the Hermès Foundation Missulsang 2018, Villa Vassilieff Pernod Ricard Fellowship, Paris, France 2016, Noon Art Prize, Gwangju Biennale 2016, and grand prize, SONGUN Art Award in 2024.

Jun’s works are in the permanent collection of leading art galleries and institutions around the world such as Han Nefkens Foundation, Uli Sigg Collection, MMCA, Seoul Museum of Art, Leeum Museum of Art, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Ulsan Museum of Art, Busan Museum of Art, Gyeonggi Museum of Art, Doosan Art Center, and SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation.

References

• 전소정, Sojung Jun (Artist Website)
• 올해의 작가상 2023, 전소정 (Korea Artist Prize 2023, Sojung Jun)
• 바라캇 컨템포러리, 전소정 (Barakat Contemproary, Sojung Jun)
• 노블레스, 그녀만의 내러티브, 2019.03.06
• 국립현대미술관, 전소정 | 마지막 기쁨, 어느 미싱사의 일일, 열 두개의 방, 보물섬 | 2012, 2012, 2014, 2014 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), Sojung Jun | Last Pleasure, A Day of a Tailor, The Twelve Rooms, Treasure Island | 2012, 2012, 2014, 2014)
• 갤러리 잔다리, 예술하는 습관 (Gallery Zandari, The Habit of Art)
• 송은, 전소정: Kiss me Quick (SONGEUN, Sojung Jun: Kiss me Quick)
• 리움미술관, 그린 스크린 (Leeum Museum of Art, Green Screen)