In fall 2011, Brain Factory holds an exhibition titled <Place of Moment>, presenting the archiving works that began in 1996 by Jeong-Eun Lee, who lives and works in both Germany and Korea. It shows an on-going project of accumulating the documentary of time by continuously recording the scenes of life that the artist observed, heard, and experienced while traveling the world. The current exhibition is composed of 5 pieces done in between 1996 to 2007 among the vast amount of records collected in past 16 years, and 14 additional works that are newly created. Four pieces of single-channel videos are installed on the wall in a band shape with 10 acrylic sketches on wood sticks. A regular format is maintained where the 60cm tall wood sticks, representing old books, are wrapping the space around. This kind of installation method becomes the least organic device allowing her archiving to be arranged as coherent as possible even in new exhibition spaces. The mathematical logic of small dots assembling to create a line becomes the matrix for the archiving means in which Lee, the artist who piles up the weights of time by accumulating the memories of space, uniformly organizes the 60cm height units. It is noticeable that the artist distributes only the assigned areas to all the works (memories), including the videos projected in the exhibition hall. Interestingly, her videos are ascribed with pre-determined projecting areas. Independent of the length of the videos, it induces an effect of assigning certain proportion of the total archiving to a video or an image. Moreover, this calculation becomes a distinctive element that enables the realization of the device that distributes the weight of memories using the installation area. Another prominent point in her archiving is that her installation intentionally mixes the video, where specific ‘space and time' information is loaded, and the faded drawings in the same space to achieve visual harmony. It can be interpreted as the artist's effort to recognize the ‘life' as a whole with the ‘thinking and perceiving self' in the center and reveal the ‘essence' itself that transcends time and space. Thus, the core of Lee's works that can be inferred from the content and format is the gaze that looks into her life with a macroscopic perspective. The artist is undergoing a prudent and original process of seeking for the essence of life and the existence of individuals.
The work that takes the largest importance among the four video pieces would be <The Cross of Gaze &The Cross of time, Jena>, a 2 minutes 15 seconds long video. The piece was recorded when Lee has stayed in Jena of the old East Germany for about 6 months since spring 2011. Projected on a scroll paper 200cm long, with dry twigs, a plastered wall filled with graffiti, and the arid daily scenes of a city as its background, the monologue flows as subtitles like a journal reflecting the artist's everyday contemplation. The dual structure of the image, depicting city view through the eyes of the camera, and the subtitles, describing the scenes rising in the artist's mind, provides the viewers with a poetic experience by juxtaposing both the realistic observation and the subjective emotion in one screen. It is the decisive reason why her recordings circle around the prose organization moving beyond simple records. The work <A walk around Tongui-dong>, done in 2011, is a video created by connecting in fast speed the still photographs that Lee took during a short trip. Her journey started from Brain Factory, walked around the town, and returned back to the same place. Walking the narrow alleyway of Tongui-dong, the artist overlaps her childhood memories to unusual site where Korean and Western styles of houses whimsically entangled. She felt the attractions and characteristics all five senses and made records of the small town where everything can be seen within 20 minutes. The work <Hutongs>, created in 2010, is named after the Chinese word ‘hutong' that refers to narrow streets in the traditional courtyard residences in China. The inhabitants in hutongs are now maintaining their scanty existences with ‘the right of residence' as collateral. In <Hutongs> the artist calmly shows their crude daily lives that she carefully filmed. Meanwhile, in < Eckernfoerde>, done in 2010, the artist did not shoot the lives by walking on the streets; rather, she recorded the performances where 10 pedestrians participated to write down messages on small boats and send them into the sea creating an overlap between the performance and the winter scene of Eckernfoerde. The work shows the performances that took place 8 times at different places such as the Yellow sea and the Atlantic illustrating the messages of hope floating on the ice melting surface and sailing over the sea.
The title of the exhibition <Place of Moment>, which is named to give importance on space, can be replaced by <Memories of Moment>; because the places that Lee and her camera observed were recorded as the memories of the existential places assuming ‘her existence there', based on the fact that the records were not machinery but intermingled with subjective emotions like her personal diary. In this context, her works differ from the documentaries in general. The ‘accumulated memories' that she neatly piled will become the inheritance of the times that would be stacked as her life moves on step by step. As can be inferred from the name of the project which emphasized the role of ‘ place', her nomadic life style and the life-long project set up as an artist have reached wise compromise. Lee's works of recording the life as a whole would become a small retrospective at each exhibition, and we cannot help looking forward to her future works in 10, and 20 years that would add up more ponderousness in content.
The Structure of Time Accumulated for Existential Introspection
- Sook-jeen Oh (Director, Brain Factory)
