The Past / The Present

Kim, MiJin (Art Critic)

Video landscape 1 – Video Garden
Jeong, SoYoun’s video work installed in the Gallery presents different periods of time in the same place. She installed a CCD camera in the garden of a house which is in front of the gallery, recorded it, and shows its gradual changes through ten TV monitors installed in the gallery. Nine TV monitors of them show the landscape of the garden in the past while one of them displays the garden in the present. The gallery space has been decorated just like a living room. And ten TV monitors have been installed on the wall just like windows or paintings. The scenes of ten TV monitors are those of the garden in different periods of time. The small garden full of roses and trees changes itself gradually as time goes by. We can see from these ten TV monitors those changes along with different periods of time, such as morning, evening, rainy day, and windy day. In seemingly stationary images in a sunny day, their movement still could be sensed from leaves and flowers trembling in the breeze and small flying bugs. Just as Impressionist Monet tried to express all the changes of the scene according to different periods of time, Jeong, SoYoun continues and develops his search with her video works. The images of ten TV monitors change even the past and the present themselves, so that the very division of the past and the present becomes ambiguous.

Video landscape 2 – the scene of the street
The image made up of two projectors on the wall is the scene of the street in front of the gallery. It is the image of the street which was recorded sometime ago or which is been broadcasted at the moment. So, here the landscape of yesterday or the past and that of the present are presented at the same time. These scenes of the street do not show any big differences only except changes of pedestrians and cars. And yet we could read the stream of time where the present gradually becomes the past.

Video Still Life
This is her video work with still life, one of the objects of painting. Two monitors with gold leaf frames on the wall shows still life composed of a flowerpot and a clock installed in the corner of the gallery.
The scene of still life seen through a camera is flat and stationary just like a painting. But close scrutiny will find out the difference between these two still lives. It is from the hands of the clock that we can tell one is the still life of the past and the other is that of the present.

Jeong, SoYoun makes stationary objects and places various new fields of visual and temporal experiences by her phenomenological approach to daily images. For us who have been accustomed to fast moving video images, her seemingly fixed and flat images seem very much like a painting. And yet when we sense delicate movements in those unchanging images, they become alive. These sensitive changes in her work lead us to be more sensitive and poetic. Jeong, SoYoun transforms objectivity and simultaneity of the video into painterly quality by expressing time two-dimensionally. The images that would seem fixed without scrutiny give us the very painterly sensibility. And Jeong, SoYoun expands daily spaces by bringing in different surrounding spaces into the small and regulated space of the gallery. Also by representing those spaces according to the changes of time, she makes us experience the stream of time where the present is transformed into the past.
Her image changing silently and secretly ushers us into the keen sensibility by drawing up concepts in contrast, such as time and space, the past and the present, speed and slowness, video and painting.