Connecting people through art 

Sojung Jun was born in Busan, Korea in 1982. She lives and works in Seoul. She received a BFA degree in Sculpture at Seoul National University and a MFA in Media Art at Yonsei University.

Sojung Jun’s idiosyncratic videos and installations evolve around the personal stories of people experiencing different forms of exile: self-imposed or forced, physical or mental, political or social. These narratives, often obscure and incomplete, serve as a departure point to reflect upon the position of the artist in contemporary society and the significance of creativity within the long span of life. Central to Jun’s practice is the notion of translation. Viewing language as a form of isolation, the artist investigates different methods of semantic and formal conversion: from reality to moving image and from image to sound, text and gesture. These are not complementary but rather parallel systems of conveying meaning that combine into complex yet poetic and personally tinged imagery. In the process of translating, re-writing and editing the material, gaps and separations emerge – to be filled in with the experiences and observations of others.

La nave de los locos (2016) is a multilayered film that comprises of four seemingly unrelated scenes. The Hieronymus Bosch painting depicting Plato’s allegory of the ship of fools is analysed on the flat screen of the computer. The cursor slides over the painting’s details, zooming in and out in response to the user’s curiosity. The camera moves on to span the city and the sea’s waves – a shift between the past and present, myth and reality. A female skateboarder appears, as if gliding over the water. She delves into the city, navigating Barcelona’s narrow streets. The text that accompanies it, emotionally and directly referencing the stories of immigrants, pulsates along the incomprehensible visual noise of the cityscape.

The artist’s direct inspiration for La nave de los locos was the book of the same title by Cristina Peri Rossi. An ‘artist is born to be exiled’ – this insight of the book’s Uruguayan author encapsulates her own personal story – a writer, translator, and left-wing and gender activist, who found refuge in Spain following a coup d’état in her native country, where her books were banned.  Referencing the novel in her own work, Sojung Jun seeks a counterpart story of a female artist on the move, with universal overtones regarding social and cultural divisions and stratification today.

Linguistic diversity seems to be one of many obstacles in the process of integration and communication. In the dark, a blind dancer tries to replicate Bosch’s imagery conveyed to him via a verbal description by the artist translated from a foreign language into his own. His dance in the dark – which delegates his blindness to the viewer – is a tactile monologue, a performance that expresses what remains unseen, embracing the dissonance between what is visible and familiar, and un-representable and alien.