[Press Release - June 2021]

Installation view of Sea Cucumber, Manganese and Ear at ONE AND J. Gallery, 2021.

1. Information

• Title: Sea Cucumber, Manganese and Ear

• Exhibition Dates: 3 June - 11 July 2021

• Artist: Soyoung Chung

• Curator: Euna Bae

• Venue: ONE AND J. Gallery (31-14 Bukchon-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, 03055, Korea)

• Opening Hours : Tuesday - Sunday, 11am - 6pm (Closed on Monday)

• Sponsored by Seoul Metropolitan Government, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture

• Website: http://oneandj.com/

• High resolution images are available for download via the link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10ZuPrWhwqXHQQ0EJ7ofb7JAngzAagNjV?usp=sharing

• Press Contact: Seoyeon Yang ([email protected])

1 2. About the exhibition

ONE AND J. Gallery presents Soyoung Chung’s Sea Cucumber, Manganese and Ear between June 3 and July 11—her first solo exhibition in five years. Chung has explored geology, oceanography and geopolitics through the objects surrounding us. This exhibition reorganizes the nine pieces of her works into three spaces along with curator’s text.

Chung’s works have been produced while pondering philosophical questions about time that the myriad materials surrounding our lives have passed through. Chung said she found a stone one day, and it inspired her to imagine the time of the Earth. Her interest spontaneously reached beneath the Earth’s surface (geology) she stood on and above it (geopolitics). Erosion and deposition serves as keys to understanding the universal history of creation and annihilation. It was when her imagination extended from soil to continents, from horizon to borders, from cities to islands, to become new weaving stories of individual, historical, natural memories. Chung has recently expanded her vision into oceanic spacetime (oceanography), where there would probably be no human soul, no human being, ever. From a human’s point of view, imagining the hadal zone amounts to calling for a spacetime in another dimension, just as moving into the universe, toward infinity. The artist put forward a long-time consideration reflecting on geological movement and oceanic epoch to face them as they are.

Sea Cucumber, Manganese and Ear leads to daily life across the water and earth surfaces, starting from the deep sea that no human would reach. The exhibition becomes a reservoir for stories with warped matters and inflections of the eyes. The events of time are embellished with embossed and etched figures, and they infinitely move to “a certain place”, according to the properties of matter. They are no less than potential affairs, a preview of what’s coming next. The place would perhaps realize the flow of the time that nothing would be concluded. With Chung, what if you follow a point of view of the substances, instead of your eyes capturing the physical substances? The Earth is hidden behind the things around us. I strain my ears, again, to the orbital echoes coming from between the stratum lines and the ocean facets.

About the Title: Sea Cucumber, Manganese and Ear

Sea cucumbers and manganese are metaphors for organisms and non-organisms that would potentially continue to be divided. Sea Cucumbers live deep in the sea. They would vomit the organs, and segment the bodies into two parts, to defend themselves from predators. The segmented bodies would be each individual entity—an outstanding capacity to regenerate that it is hard to determine when they would die. Called black gold, Manganese nodule is a mineral cluster containing cobalt, nickel, copper and others. It is formed through an accumulation of time in the lowest layer in the ocean. Not only it is used for oil refineries, aircraft engines and steel industries. But also it is a vital nutrient for the human body, and it helps grains to grow. It is an organism and non-organism, symbolizing an abstract time of the universe, that serves as an essential energy element for many creatures such as sea cucumbers reproducing themselves to live everlasting lives. An Ear is a part of the body, an organ of hearing and balance. It functions in this exhibition as a contact device corresponding to the outside world, a suggestion for such attitudes as ‘approaching’ and ‘nearing.’

2 3. About the artist

Soyoung Chung (b. 1979, Korea) received her DNSAP at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in France. She has held solo exhibitions at ONE AND J. Gallery (2021, Seoul), Offsite Art Sonje (2016, Seoul), Daelim Museum of Art (2013, Seoul), OCI Museum of Art (2011, Seoul), Project Space Sarubia (2008, Seoul), Kumho Museum of Art (2007, Seoul), Gallery Miss China Beauty (2006, Paris). She has also participated in group exhibitions at Delfina Foundation (2019, London), Total Museum of Art (2018, Seoul), Doosan Art Gallery (2018, Seoul), Hyundai Card Storage (2018, Seoul), SongEun Art Space (2018, Seoul), New Art Exchange (2018, Nottingham) and many more. She was awarded the SongEun Art Excellence Award in 2016, and also participated in Hyundai Card Gapado Artist-in-Residence, SeMA Nanji Residency, Clayarch Gimhae Residency, etc.

3 4. Selected work image Donwload link

Soyoung Chung, Island for Fishermen, 2021. Buoy presumed to have floated out of the economic zone of Korea and China and copper, Dimension variable. Courtesy of Delfina Foundation, Korean Cultural Centre UK, and SongEun ArtSpace. Photo by Tim Bowditch.

Island for Fishermen, 2021

In the ocean between South Korea and China, there is an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in which both countries have the right to economic participation; and there is a territorial sea in which each country exerts sovereignty. Somewhere between them, there is a submerged rock, called Ieodo, two square kilometers in size. Given the location and the size, the little islet fails to legally earn the territorial status. So no one can claim dominion. South Korea constructed the Ieodo Ocean Research Station on the rock at 40 meters below the sea level to study oceanography. Strained diplomatic relations over the jurisdiction is manifested by ropes and a couple of buoys, possibly from their respective EEZs.

4 Soyoung Chung, Rolling, 2020-2021. Steel, Powder Coating, Dimension variable. Photo by Uno Yi.

Rolling, 2020-2021

Deep time. Just as usual, an unknown path passes a boundary. Iron is one of the most widespread heavy metals that has been with humans for a long time. The quality of sturdiness allows iron to have flexible elasticity; and the quality of heaviness encourages it to plow ahead. The US Army Camp Long was established in 1955 to support the Korean Army. It had been closed since 2010, and it went back to the public in 2020. The military’s factitious orbit has returned to the cycle of nature. Who would then occupy the place to produce the memory? The spatial orbit based on time does not coincide with the time orbit based on space. Incompatibility of time and space becomes the engine of locomotion.

5 Soyoung Chung, Drawing an Island, 2020. Single channel video, 5’ 33” (loop).

Drawing an Island, 2020

A gray and stormy sky reveals an islet. Sunken rocks are not the only ones in an oceanic uproar, in which the deep, high waves leave traces. There are actually those who believe 11,000 years ago the rocks were an edge of a continent. Myriad oceanic stories reach terra firma to permeate daily lives. To be an island, a rock reportedly refused the lunar gravity. Today, circular wisdom draws a soundless ripple.

6 Soyoung Chung, Mirrors for Mirok Li, 2021. Silver Nitrate, Sodium hydroxide, Glucose, Ammonium hydroxide, Purified water, Tempered white glass, stainless steel, 80 x 120 x 6 cm each.

Mirror for Mirok Li, 2021

Amnok River, or Yalu River, is a river on the border between North Korea and China. Standing before the familiar-but-strange waters, I was looking for something to fill the unattended time. I tried to pick up memories one by one that were floating from the river. Long ago, there was a man whose name was Mirok Li (1899-1950). He, too, recorded his memories coming to his mind before the waters. He let the anxiety go, expecting the river to carry it away. He left home to keep away from the turmoil. In his book, The Yalu Flows, Li stood on the Chinese soil to look back on his hometown across Amnok River. An outbreak of the pandemic disease has widened the distance. It has also spreaded distrust in each other, and the anxiety has brought about new borders. The remoteness has become a bubble to be broken. Sprinkling a glass with a chemical mixture of water and nitric acid, ammonia water, potassium hydroxide and others leads to a reaction that results in a reflection of the light on the glass surface. The stagnant water mixture makes a landscape. The remaining water is turned into a flower. Losing the intention brings about new stories on the layer. I see myself between the stains and blemishes in the awkward scene.

7 Soyoung Chung, Jet Lag, 2021. Steel pipe, metallas, bearing, fish net, powder coating, LED light, plywood, 160 x 270 x 300 cm.

Jet Lag, 2021

I would say it was somewhere around 2019 when Soyoung told me about manganese—if asked where the beginning was. “On the deep sea is a mineral called manganese,” she said. “A strawberry has some in it, too. You need some love? Eat some manganese!” We talked and talked about manganese and others. It led us to converse about potatoes, and we started shooting the breeze about sea cucumbers. We watched a film on Netflix showing the reality of the marine destruction caused by the large-scale commercial fishing industry. I still don’t know what we were looking forward to. We simply couldn’t but stop it. Looking back again, everything might start from Gapado in 2018. There, she said, “I was looking at the isle all the way back in the ocean. Day by day, little by little, it makes me feel, like, the rock in the ocean is making a move to the right and to the left. It is as if, just like the moon, it is following us.” The line of Gapado rose from the flat water surface, and it turned into a figure to come to me. Surrounded by the great ocean, the flat island moved to become a little dot, and, again, it was absorbed into the horizon. Even looking back further, it could be the Korean Demilitarized Zone in which Soyoung pulled the glowing rock on a rice paddy in 2016. It also could be London in which she raised a window blind in a studio, leaving a long trip to find the lost time of the city bricks. Or, it could be a notebook in which she drew lines and circles. Our memories might be a collection of stories from the near past and from the long past. The stories are sometimes getting close to us—and getting distant from us. The fragmented memories are little dots. They are to become lines and figures. We can finally realize, when they made a specific entity, everything is about timing.

8 Soyoung Chung, 29.5 Days, 2021. Aluminum, glasses, foreshore, transparent epoxy, 320 x 100 x 10 cm.

29.5 Days, 2021

We went to Anmyeondo at a different time. I could enjoy some sea cucumbers and oysters that I bought from the fishermen. It was around noon. Sitting under beach umbrellas they were trimming the seafood. A couple of waves bumped into each other in between the two big low islands. It was where a road was open. About a couple of months later when Soyoung visited Anmyeondo, It was late afternoon right before the sunset. Ocean surface rises and drains away twice a day. This recurrent pattern, called ebb and flow, is shifted daily by a difference of 50 minutes per a day. It is because of the difference between the 24-hour Earth's rotation and the 29.5-days of revolution of the Moon. Soyoung brought the memories of low tides to the coordinate table, which had disappeared for the cycle of the moon, to records of the traces of high tides. She embossed space with the coordinate system and etched the traces of time. Looking at her reminded me of what Italo Calvino (1923-1985) said: “... all printed in negative in the dough of the void, so that there is nothing now that does not leave its print, every possible print of every possible thing, and together every transformation of these prints, instant by instant.”

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