THING: Jung Sungyoon
Jung Sungyoon will present new works that move beyond his previous geometric shapes and simple colours, emphasizing tactile qualities.
Jung’s signature works combine primitive mechanical devices with geometric forms. They hover close without colliding, creating repetitive motions that feel both absurd and futile, like a theater of the absurd. Rounded or angular shapes move closer and farther apart in shallow cycles, symbolizing the rise, expansion, and end of desire. Although the sculptures appear cold and heavy, they explore one of the deepest aspects of human identity; desire, and create a gap between visual perception and memory, offering a space for reflection.
In this solo exhibition Jung presents works using new materials, such as fur, to further expand the scope of visual and tactile perception. While the simple, repetitive mechanical devices from his earlier works still appear, the materials are now tactile. In the gallery, these moving objects perform their predetermined motions, highlighting contrasts between the different textures of each piece.
With these new materials, Jung creates fluid, unpredictable forms that differ from the rigid, limited outlines of his previous works. Their repetitive moments deepen his exploration of human struggle and conflict. Materials without defined contours symbolize the untraceable origins of desire, filling the exhibition space. Through metaphorical and ambiguous mechanical devices, Jung reflects on the futility and unmeasurable limits of enduring human fate. (Gallery Chosun)
We each perform our own unknown scenario and looking inside it can be frightening. Recognising paths we cannot understand carries the fear of death. In a time where temporality seems lost, the machine serves as a medium to hold hidden losses, sorrows, fears, acts of revenge, and moments of compassion. Forms and materials that drift outside time circulate, creating a paradoxical illusion through the continuous interface between the actions of the machine and the objects. These works become diagrams representing desire across the past, present, and future.
In this solo exhibition, there is no predetermined form or fixed outcome. This arises from the uncertainty of the mind’s influence on actions and the principles that guide them. The goal is not to carve or add to create a specific form, but to maintain a state that evolves into an unknown shape. Through awareness of unpredictable paths and what lies within them, the process in which force evolves into form and increasing entropy hovers along the critical diagonal is realised through functional or non-functional mechanical mechanisms. This serves as a methodology for observing nature and human life, as well as a means to reconstruct and regulate the illusion of the existential form called the self. (Jung Sungyoon)