The Interaction Between “Seeing” and “Being Seen”
Yoon Jin Sup (Art Critic / Professor at Honam University)
Translated by Gallery Chosun
Ⅰ. Inside a room, there is a single desk. On it sits a model of a box-shaped building, and next to it, a TV monitor rests on an ordinary chair. On the screen appear close-up images of faces looking into the model through its windows, or sometimes parts of their bodies.
All of these images are recorded by small surveillance cameras installed in the model. Visitors look into the model placed at the centre of the exhibition space, while the camera inside films the visitors and sends the footage to the nearby monitor.
We often have similar experiences in daily life. For example, when entering a shop that sells televisions, seeing yourself on a screen. The image is captured by a video camera installed nearby and transmitted to the monitor. In this case, the medium that allows us to see ourselves on the screen is modern technology; the video camera.
Jeong Jeong-ju’s work centres on the video camera. As a recording device, the video camera can transmit events in real time to a monitor or record them on tape, and is often used as proof of what happened. Video, with functions such as replay, fast-forward, and freeze-frame, entered the field of contemporary art long ago and has now become an independent genre.
Beyond art, video cameras have become deeply embedded in everyday life. Easy-to-use camcorders are now common household items, and small surveillance cameras installed in banks, offices, and homes closely watch our actions. Like the presence of “Big Brother” in George Orwell’s 1984, we have come to live under constant observation by this product of modern civilization. Surveillance cameras are everywhere, yet in the rush of daily life we often forget they exist. This sometimes leads to ironic incidents, such as a nervous offender seeing their own image on the TV news and turning themselves in
Ⅱ. Jeong Jeong-ju’s video works focus on perception and the viewer’s psychological response as they occur between the audience, a model of a specific building, and the surrounding space; in other words, a single environment. He is interested in the similarity between the human eye and the video camera, especially their shared functions of seeing and recording. According to him, what a person sees with the naked eye in one day is equivalent to about 16 hours of a video camera in operation. If PAL video records 25 frames per second, this means a human sees roughly 1.44million images per day. Yet despite this similarity, the human eye and the camera lens cannot be structurally identical. A camera lens cuts a fixed area of its subject into a rectangular frame and records it, while the human eye remains open. As a result, the human visual field cannot be artificially segmented and is continuous.
Jeong’s video work creates a “strange” aesthetic experience through visual perception. Although an exhibition space is already separate from everyday life, this non-ordinary environment intensifies the sense of alienation. Visitors enter the gallery and look around the architectural model installed inside. Soon, through nearby monitors, they discover themselves peering into the model. As they trace the cause, they realise that small surveillance cameras are installed inside the model and are recording their every movement. In other words, they become aware that while they are observing an object, they themselves are being observed by another. Seeing their own image projected on the monitor, they experience the shock of “strangeness”, or alienation.
Jeong’s work explores the relationship between “seeing” and “being seen” that unfolds through perception; in other words, the phenomenology of perception between the subject who perceives and the object that is perceived and recorded. The architectural model is based on an actual space where the artist lives and works. Inside the model, a small surveillance camera is installed that can rotate 120 degrees left and right. The camera films its subjects through a glass door attached to the model.
Viewers, curious, look into the model through the glass door and soon discover their own image on a monitor. The camera also moves forward, backward, left, and right, constantly recording both the interior of the model and the surrounding exhibition space, and transmitting these changing images to the monitor. By its nature, the surveillance camera can only capture and transmit a cut-out portion of the scene, which appears on the monitor as a rectangular frame. What viewers see on the monitor is only the area caught by the camera lens; everything else disappears from view.
As viewers watch the constantly shifting images on the screen, they try to mentally connect the captured areas with the parts that have been vanished. Through this process; through the interaction between “seeing” and “being seen”, or in the artist’s words, between “observing” and “being observed”, the work seeks to expand the horizon of meaning held by the object.
Ⅲ. In Jeong Jeong-ju’s work, light and space are key elements. The spaces he sets up in his work are privately familiar ones; places from everyday life such as his own living areas, school dormitories for students, snack bars, and indoor gymnasiums. While he reproduces the structures of these buildings in very simple forms, he removes the interior furnishings. He explains this choice as follows:
“The inside of the model space is empty. I am more interested in empty spaces than in spaces filled with furniture such as desks, bookshelves, or wardrobes. Rooms left completely bare after moving out, small shop buildings waiting for new owners, empty gymnasiums, and small rooms with long corridors and windows that might once have been part of a hotel. When you enter such emptied spaces, you can focus on the space itself in a way that is not possible in everyday life. The size and placement of walls and ceilings, windows and doors, allow each space to reveal its own character. These characteristics make the spaces appear like “organic” living beings, similar to cells.
Here, the artist’s interest in the space of a building itself points to his focus on its structural aspects and the environment surrounding it. Jeong Jeong-ju’s building models, made of wood and plastic, have simple geometric exteriors, a quality closely tied to his long-standing exploration of architecture. As he studies the social, psychological, and structural characteristics of architecture, he turns his attention to its aesthetic dimensions; especially light and the way space responds to it. One work from 1999, in which a halogen lamp is installed in the ceiling of a long building model so that strong light spills out through the windows, has a striking evocative power, reminiscent of a night train. In this piece, light, as a fundamental formal element, plays a prominent role alongside the building’s simple structure.
The spaces Jeong Jeong-ju creates are rooted in private experience, which carries great significance in his work. Memories of personal spaces from childhood to youth; particularly a church residence, along with experiences shaped by its distinctive spatial structure, form the foundation of his practice today. Just as a camera lens cannot capture everyday part of a subject, and just as memory cannot reproduce all information in full, Jeong’s recollections of space are refined into an essence that produces a restrained aesthetic. At the intersection of “seeing” and “being seen”, and of “surveilling” and “being surveilled”, his interactive strategy continues to gain deeper meaning.
