Youngdon Jung
2021Orbital Squares
Mujin Jung, Hyoyoung Jung
"Orbital Squares", by the media art collective Moojin Brothers, points to deeper understandings of a cultural and political moment unfolding despite and because of human intervention. As elusive as it is utterly gripping, the film juxtaposes and intersperses three scenes. A snail’s movements – tentative, curious – on a grooved mound of clay are contrasted against the powerful rhythms of a horserace shot at 240 frames per second; both of these are bookended by a shadowy display of a living, sculptural humanoid seemingly tormented by a web-like concoction of thread and nails fully enveloping its head, as a soundscape of terror and flickering embers unfolds.
Orbital Squares
목하, 세계진문
Mujin Jung, Hyoyoung Jung
Now, Curiosity about the World (2018) consists of 80 B&W photographic film slides shot in an underground aquarium and on a rooftop of an infamous high-rise in Seoul. The enlarged sea creatures are superimposed over bird’s eye views of the city and silhouettes of visitors, engendering a haunting clash of the oceanic depth and ether, nature and modernity. Interwoven with extracts from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, these unearthly imageries unfurl, as the artists describe, a new narrative of “a submarine that pierces across the 21st-century metropolis.”
Now, Curiosity About the World
풍경
Mujin Jung, Hyoyoung Jung
Scriptures of Wind (2016) is a grim tale of two brothers, a mythical creature and a vanished father, told through stop motion animation. Awakened from the sleep, the two brothers find themselves drudging to preserve sacred objects from the past in a murky dystopian facility. The thrumming sound of machines running and time passing invoke ceaseless fatigue in the aimless progression. The brothers contemplate the possibility to reclaim the presentness from the scrutiny of “the past that hasn’t finished…and the future that is…overflowing.” The only creature that reaches the ending in the story is Myrmecoleon, a mythical creature that dies from an insatiable hunger in Jorge Luis Borge’s writing, Book of Imaginary Beings.
Scriptures of the Wind
좋은 세상
Mujin Jung, Hyoyoung Jung
A Better World (2017) follows the process of the ballot counting for the 19th Presidential Election in South Korea. The election took place in 2017 subsequent to a series of Candlelight protests leading to the impeachment of the predecessor. The highly charged atmosphere and restless energy amongst volunteers are palpable in the attentive documentation of the arrival and opening of ballot boxes in the public eye. As the counting begins the footage is coupled with another frame, shot with a thermal imaging camera, unveiling the unseen layer of an already transparent process.
A Better World