Text by Kim, Kyoung Min
From Seo, Jae-jung’s Solo Exhibition catalogue, ARTSPACE HYUN, Seoul, 2011.6.8-14
Storytelling in an Aesthetic Space
Kim, Kyoung Min (Chief Curator of ARTSPACE HYUN)
I think buildings in an urban area is the kind of existence that everybody looks at, while moving by transportation or talking a walk in the park. Seo Jae Jung uses the architectural elements of buildings that emerges in the ordinary life as a motif for her work. The artist has interest in buildings that always stand in the same place between buildings, and in particular, her interest is in the basic architectural structure that a building has, completely excluding ornamental elements among these buildings.
The artist try to express the recurring and cycling process that many architectural buildings gather together and newly create memory of people as if lines and sides gather and make an entrance, walls and pillars of the building. The work of the artist arouses the viewers' curiosity as if unlimited visual scenes might spread through the partitions of the empty space, as the space which is created by joined lines and sides forms a maze.
Seo Jae Jung's recent works include such titles as ‘Phantasmagoria’, ‘ILLUSORY’, and ‘Multiply Connected Space’. So, her works show functional parts intrinsic to architectural building that are created clearly by joined lines and sides, and arouses imagination as 'psychological space' concerning the new architectural space that lines and sides produce and creates with architectural buildings as a motif. Accordingly, her work, ‘Multiply Connected Space’ expresses psychological space beyond actual space, so it stimulates the play of imagination about 'space' from the viewers.
The artist imagines psychological space as a place where individual time, place and experiences which we have gone through are concentrated in one place. This is ‘Mind Architecture’. That is, through a single space, the aspect of reality and the psychological functions which a person makes, it tries to look for the background of the consciousness which exists beyond time and space in the flexible flow of the age and tries to find the part that can be shared with others as a platform of space that projects each person's time and experience. When our brain stores information, the information exists individually because our brain has the habit of storing information in a more simplified form than the original information due to its inherent limitation. However it makes it possible for others create their storytelling with her work as a link.
This exhibition aims to find the background of consciousness that exists beyond time and space in a flexible flow of the age where personal recognition and experiences have become diverse. By composing the aspects of reality which we experience through the space of architecture in a new way, it makes us imagine an architectural space where individual time and experience can be projected. That is, Seo Jae Jung makes viewers expect the joy created and imagined according to artistic inspiration as a psychological space that is not stipulated nor fixed in reality. Also, we ask ourselves if what she is trying to convey is 'emphasis on creation', ‘Soh-Tong’ which is a recent social trend.
