SoYoun Jeong Solo Show <Funnier Exhibition, Really Really!>

 

Kim, Hong-hee (Director, SSamzie Space)

SSamzie Space invited media artist SoYoun Jeong for its Solo Show program in the year 2005 season. Under the title of <Funnier Exhibition, Really Really!>, Jeong presents a sensibly funnny show regarding the course of artmaking, from production to consumption. In this solo exhibition, Jeong features the artmaking environment and process based on her everyday life, as well as interaction with audiences and the distribution of artworks in a rather lighthearted yet in-depth manner, through which she attempts to suggest a unique paradigm and perspective on the current state of contemporary media art.

SoYoun Jeong explores beyond various genres and media by embracing diverse disciplines in artmaking, including installations, video, objects, and interactive media. As shown in this solo exhibition, the main subject of her artworks shifted from her previous interest in multimedia aesthetics to communication problems and social standing or function of art.

In conjunction with a video installation concerning her life in New York as an artist and mother, an animation of snap shots that deals with the constraint she has as a housewife artist is juxtaposed. She also presents an interactive media installation that captures noises of the audience then projects texts accordingly. What is notable is the witty piece initiated on the premise that the artworks - installations in particular ? come to face a death when they ended up in storage not being circulated in the art market.

For the piece, SoYoun Jeong devised a vending machine that sells packaged CDs transferred from her personal archive through conveyer belt. Each of three different CD packages separately include <Adults Only>, <Mobius Strip>, and her portfolios. She also arranged a video room where audiences can sample her works before they make a purchase the artworks, through which she attempts to establish a solid relationships with audiences and others to communicate with outside world by transcending self-centered narcissism. Throughout the exhibition, we can find the certain lively sensibility of new generation that Jeong maintains in dealing with such serious issues as solidifying the relationships between arts and society and as raising issues of dissemination and circulation of artworks.