The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul is pleased to present Jesper Just: This is a Landscape of Desire, in celebration of 55 years of diplomatic ties between Korea and Denmark. The exhibition, which is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Korea, sheds light on 13 major works from the internationally-acclaimed video artist’s oeuvre in the last decade.

Jesper Just is a promising artist renowned internationally, and represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale in 2013. His works, in which the video, sound and editing equal the quality of commercial films, carefully trace the delicate emotional exchanges between human beings (and their environment), and shed light on the human contradictory nature.

Just’s work initially focused on the subject of ‘male’, then started to redirect the interest to the subject of ‘female’ in 2008. ‘The projection of the secret female desire’ runs as a common thread among the works in this exhibition. The video, along with the accompanying theremin* performance, is completely mysterious and dreamy. *Theremin is a Russian-invented synthesizer instrument controlled without physical contact by the performer, producing sounds by two high-frequency oscillators.

Produced for this exhibition, This is a Landscape of Desire (2013) features two women, whose relationship to each other is unknown, wandering about in wasteland led by their desires. Two large screens face and engage each other in complex communication in Nameless Spectacle (2011), which is charged with intricate emotional and psychological conditions between a middle-aged woman with a disability and a young man who pursues her. The exhibition also presents Sirens of Chrome (2010), A Voyage in Dwelling (2008), and Just’s latest work What a Feeling (2014), publicly shown for the first time through this exhibition.

*image (left)
Jesper Just
This Nameless Spectacle, 2011,
2 channels projected, 13.00min
video installation
courtesy of the artist