Jeoung Jae Choul: For Love and Peace

The Jeoung Jae Choul: For Love and Peace exhibition presents a retrospective on the artist Jeoung Jae Choul (1959–2020) on the occasion of his one-year memorial. It outlines his participatory projects, all of which took place in many different places through the utilization of mobility. It reconstructs his onsite actions—which formed his “documented and collected” artworks—and attempts to follow his artistic practices. This exhibition marks his post-2000s turning point regarding both his attitude and his methodology as an artist. Through his introduction of site-focused works such as the Silk Road Project (2004–2011) and the Blue Ocean Project (2013–2020), he revealed a transformation of his outlook and thoughts and introspection towards societal issues.

For Jeoung, travelling, migrating, and leaving were seen as artistic practices and ways of living life. In the Silk Road Project, as he travelled along the silk road—a trade route through Eurasia before modern times—he crossed the border of countries and gave out the used banners to the local people to create shadows under the burning sun. With this, he created and documented coincidental encounters, exchanges, incidents, and happenings. He recorded the journey of repetitive walking moments as a route map, and it captured a performative process of migration and path-making. He acknowledged a sense of place outside the map and from the exchanges and networks he formed with people in those places. He pursued a hybrid form in which he flexibly accommodated the uniqueness and culture of a region.

The migration featured in the Silk Road Project continues into that of the objects in his other work, the Blue Ocean Project. It captures ocean pollution—the common land of humankind—as physical evidence and shows the network between non-human things that interfere with humanity and accelerate incidents. The Silk Road Project directs towards the outside of the subject, as it practices encountering and exchanging. The respect toward the cycle of non-human things and the strength of coexistence portrayed in the Blue Ocean Project directs towards the common line that works beyond the common land borders.

The Jeoung Jae Choul: For Love and Peace follows the attitudes echoed in his performative and bodily practice of migrating between borders, and his thoughts on ecology shown in cyclic objects based on his awareness of problems on the common land of humankind. The title For Love and Peace is a written phrase on a tent at the anti-war protest camp in Parliament Square, London. It was the last travelling destination of the Silk Road Project. Love and peace—the two words often found in Jeoung’s works—reveal the horizon of the commons that he aimed to reflect through his participatory projects. In this “globalization-minus,” which encompasses the loss of solidarity and environmental destruction, Jeoung’s practices and thoughts suggest the direction we should face in times of new emerging boundaries and standards.

Jeoung Jae Choul (1959–2020, Suncheon) actively worked with sculpting media from the late 1990s to 2000. He was known for the works Between and Forest of Seclusion. He had his first solo exhibition at the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation’s Art Center in 1992. From 2005, he presented and exhibited the Silk Road Project (2004–2011) that focused on a theme of cultural transfer and migration, of which was realized along traveling the silk road. This project was presented as several solo exhibitions at Project Space Zip, Keumsan Gallery, Kim Chong Yung Museum, and others. Later, he started Blue Ocean Project (2013–2020) on a theme of ocean pollution as he researched beaches in South Korea. It was shown at his solo exhibition, Tideland (JM Gallery, 2015), and group exhibitions such as Moving & Migration (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 2019), Ocean_New Messengers (Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art, 2019), and #Art #Commons #NamJunePaik (NJP Art Center, 2018). He also presented both site-specific works and public artworks at Jeju Biennale (Jeju Museum of Art, 2017), Jirisan Project 2014 (Silsang Temple, 2014), and Busan Biennale (Oncheon-cheon, Busan, 2006).

Participants: film commissioned by Jongkwan Paik, artist’s notes reseached and edited by Ahyoung Lee

Host: Arts Council Korea