It is said artist Jung Jung-ho's work begins with his exploration of form through the medium of photography. And yet, aesthetic experiments with figurative images and formative content is not all of his work. What we often find in his work is a method seemingly focusing attention on photographic thinking rather than results. He said photography is a means by which he witnesses events and thoughts, seeing the evidence left by the traces of time like fossils. In this sense, his exploration of photography seems to be motivated by his concern for the figurative world, his perspective toward this world, and all of his perceptions. His work thus displays an overlap of his artistic imagination and gestures as specific symbolic indicators with the images he captures. That is, the images he captures in photographs are an aspect of nature and indicators of the world he envisages and contemplates.

His works on display at this exhibition showcase details of ice that look like microcosms captured with a close-up lens. The images are like the fine structures of an organism magnified with a microscope or a universe captured with an astronomical telescope. The surface of ice irregularly reflecting candle light seems like another world beyond the visible. 

As in his previous work, featuring mountain ridges capped with snow, Jung encapsulated natural objects in photographs. Nevertheless, he wants to show another world implied by the form of things rather than the natural things he chooses to photograph. He wants to reveal a hidden world. He created a sense of dreary, noiseless space in his condensed scenes of nature covered with snow, and now in his ice images we might feel like momentarily existing beings in the middle of a universe where time stands still.  

The different aspects and conditions of a material – water, snow, ice – are represented in Jung's photographs. His photographic pieces have the distinctiveness of drawing out minute changes in visual impression. The viewers realize that their eyes are not fixed to a certain point but flow along the grains of matter in the empty blank spaces of white or the halted space engendered by a glimmering light in the deep gloom. They undergo a paradoxical situation in which they respond to some force hidden behind a thing rather than the thing itself. Jung captures the subtle flow of nature. 

Jung has been infatuated with the medium of photography because it visually captures every moment of a material. This is also why photography is best to capture minute changes and sensuous elements deriving from every encounter with a material and its condition. Recently however, he carried his ideas a step further, coming more closely to objects and moving beyond his previous contemplative eyes. The artist seems to pay attention to the role of photography at the place where the object of matter meets his spirit in a stream, removing the distance between the material and the artist. Photography is not a medium but his eyes, and now the artist himself. 

Through "seeing" and "thinking" through the medium of photography, Jung has discovered he sees and thinks as in a photograph and views the world as a photograph, highlighting the minute details or grains on the surface of matter. He seems to show the flow of the grains is not different from the stream of his spirit and the artist himself and the world are there in a photographic manner. Through his works, we discover the artist himself, or his eyes, focusing on the things he found rather than specific matter and form in the space where noises disappear and the space like death where even time stands still. 
- SeungHoon Lee, CyArt

*image (left)
texture II, 2014
pigment print, 73x100cm
courtesy of the artist