Through February 12, a collaboration between curator Yoo Eun-soon and artist Jung Hye-jung
“How human-beings and non-human-beings are intertwined”
PERIGEE Gallery is holding the PERIGEE Team Project 2021 exhibition <Trouble Travel> through February 12. <Trouble Travel>, the first exhibition of the new year, is a collaboration between curator Yoo Eun-soon and artist Jung Hye-jung, who were matched through the PERIGEE Team Project 2021 open call. For one year, the two formed a temporary team to reflect on and share ideas about what art can do, and they set out to listen to, and lend their voices to, the many diverse beings that have long stood at the margins of the world and of art.
In this exhibition, PERIGEE Gallery is imagined as a world submerged underwater, and through works, texts, and furniture installations it depicts from multiple angles how human-beings and non-human-beings are intertwined with one another. The exhibition comprises Jung Hye-jung’s three-channel video <End Island> (2021) and related drawings, the single-channel video <Liquid Person> (2021), seven texts in which Yoo Eun-soon approaches Jung Hye-jung’s work on a meta and micro level, and four tables reinterpreting the work of Yoo Eun-soon and Jung Hye-jung.
Jung Hye-jung has maintained a steady interest in the non-human-beings around us, pursuing videos, installations, animations, and projects that cross the boundaries between subject and other, inside and outside, human and non-human. Her three-channel video <End Island> was created to remember animals that have already gone extinct. In this work, the artist actively imagines herself, a human-being, ‘becoming’ a non-human-being. She merges her own body with the bodies of extinct animals and feels her way into how these beings perceive and sense the world.
The single-channel video <Liquid Person> recognizes that, on the microscopic scale of the world within the body, non-human-beings are already deeply involved. The child made of lines who appears in both works traverses the macroscopic and microscopic scales, suggesting that our bodies and the world are inseparably intertwined.
Yoo Eun-soon has curated exhibitions that begin from the otherness inherent in the body and question the elements that constitute individual identity—social minority status, normal and abnormal, disabled and non-disabled—while focusing on performativity and the process of becoming. In preparing for this team project, she comes to know the intertwined ‘bodies’ of others that she had not previously been aware of, expanding the scope of her interest to encompass human-beings and non-human-beings. She also approaches Jung Hye-jung’s work on a meta and micro level, reconsidering the relationship between human and non-human through a series of texts. In this project, Yoo Eun-soon draws not only on critical writing but also on poetic, novelistic, and essayistic styles—writing with a science-fiction imagination, presenting data that examines how climate and biological species have changed within the shared terrain of the body that is the Earth, telling a story of a being reduced to nothing but a brain through the development of technological civilization, and writing that empathizes with Jung Hye-jung’s human-becoming-animal work—ranging freely across subjects and crossing boundaries. The seven distinct texts show connections that follow one after another, tail to tail, while also revealing just how intricately the world is intertwined. 070-4676-7096
▲ Jung Hye-jung, <End Island> (2021)
▲ Jung Hye-jung, <End Island> (2021)
▲ Jung Hye-jung, <Liquid Person> (2021), photographed by Kim Ik-hyun