Exhibitions

Meeting the Earth Halfway¹

Eunsoon Yoo & Haejung Jung

Haejung Jung and Eunsoon Yoo present 《Trouble Travel》, the result of a yearlong Perigee Team project. Between Jung’s ongoing focus on the nonhuman-beings around us in her individual and collaborative work and Yoo’s interest in performative identity and questions about the subject/other dichotomy at the personal and social levels, the two of them discovered a common interest where their experiences intersect in the area of “becoming-nonhuman-being”

The “trouble” part of the title 'Trouble Travel' comes from Donna Haraway’s book 「Staying with the Trouble」. Deconstructing the anthropocentric perspective of distinguishing and controlling “nonhuman beings,” Haraway posits a concept of “staying with the trouble,” as “multispecies” possessing different languages and ways of living focus on “partial recuperation” and “getting on together.”² This includes a practical connotation, in the sense that it involves opposing unified orders and universality in favor of an orientation toward a world of sympoiesis among the various entangled beings existing on earth and the formation of multiple connective networks among those beings.³ The “travel” part is used in the sense of the Perigee team project being both a temporary journey together, as well as the idea of the “becoming-nonhuman-being” effort being a process of casting aside the established order and deconstructing the center in physical, psychological, and practical terms.⁴《Trouble Travel》 is a journey in which an artist and curator team up temporarily over the course of a year to ponder and share the things that art is capable of achieving, adopting a loose linkage in a world of upheaval as they attempt to speak out together while they listen to the various beings that exist far away from the center of the world and art.

The exhibition consists of Jung’s three-channel video work <End Island> (2021) and associated drawings, her single-channel video <Liquid Person> (2021), seven texts in which Yoo approaches Jung’s work from a meta/micro level, and four tables that reinterpret both Yoo and Jung’s work. For this exhibition, Perigee Gallery is presumed to exist as an underwater world, using artwork, texts, and furniture installation to show in various ways how human-beings and nonhuman-beings are intertwined.

Haejung Jung has worked in videos, installations, animation, and projects that straddle the boundaries between subject and “other,” inside and outside, human and nonhuman. Through her own artist’s body, she experiences what exists in between things that seem rigidly distinguished. Summoning from afar things that appear unconnected with us and repositioning them in the exhibition setting, she narrows the gap and shows the fiction of boundaries. Her work is like water. Water does indeed appear often as a theme in her work, in forms such as the sea or the Han River, but there are also echoes of water in her approach and her forms. She is constantly roaming about, varying between one theme and another, and collaborating with various people in her projects—from experts such as musicians, dancers, architects, designers, and programmers to ordinary people—rather than adhering rigidly to her own identity as an artist. Her formal flexibility and open-ended approach are consistent with the thematic aspects of her work.

While Jung’s past work has placed her in the position of observing nonhuman-beings, this team project involves a practice of becoming or doing nonhuman-being. The artist includes an element of artistic imagination to mimic ways in which the nonhuman-being perceives the world. Her three-channel video End Island was created to remember animals that have gone extinct. For this work, she actively imagines her human-being self “becoming” a nonhuman-being. She hybridizes her own body into something merged with the extinct animal’s body, sensing how that animal understands and perceives the world. While <End Island> imagines human-being/nonhuman-being symbiosis at the large-scale level of the world, her single-channel video <Liquid Person> recognizes the ways in which nonhuman-beings already deeply permeate us at the small-scale level of the world within the body. The child rendered in lines in both works cuts across the large-scale and small-scale realms, alluding to the inextricable entanglement between our body and the world.

Starting from the otherness inherent to the body, Eunsoon Yoo has organized exhibitions that question the elements that comprise individual identity (social minority status, “normal” and “abnormal,” “disability” and “nondisability”) as they focus on performativity and becoming. “Otherness,” an important concept that has often appeared in her planning, is not fixed like the subject, but constantly changing according to social roles, times, and spaces. We too find ourselves placed either within or outside the “other.” The space that is the body is not governed by the human as sole master; it is a space shared with other things, a complex and intertwined space that is open and can be passed through. The process of sharing discussions over the team project’s yearlong duration was a time spent understanding the many intertwined “bodies” of others that we had not previously been conscious of. Through the project, Yoo’s interest has broadened to include human-beings and nonhuman-beings.

Yoo approaches Jung’s work at a meta/micro level, reconsidering the human/nonhuman relationship in her writings. She spotlights the open, entangled bodies in this work from multiple angles. Her writing is not merely critical; she also engages in writing flavored with (sci-fi) imagination, drawing on styles that are poetic, novelistic, and essaylike. Starting with food as a substance that passes through the body, this imagination takes off to arrive at a nonmaterial world, crossing boundaries and exploring everything from data showing how the climate and species have changed within the shared physical realm of the Earth to stories about technological developments that result in beings consisting solely of a brain, as well as texts that enter Jung’s process of human/animal becoming. The seven different texts she has rendered sometimes connect with each other in turn—a writing approach that shows how complex the world’s interlinkages are. Her writings practice “the subject becoming the other” as they abandon the idea of a fixed first-person narrator in favor of varied subjects, and she also places beings within Jung’s new works <End Island> and <Liquid Person> in an attempt to understand those worlds.

The texts are placed on tables alongside Jung’s drawings and the prolog video from <End Island>. Produced in collaboration with Kyungtaek Roh, the tables were created by weaving together three different kinds of wood into a single plank that was then split into four pieces. They occupy space like islands of a sort. Just as islands that appear separate over the water’s surface are actually joined underwater into a single land mass, this alludes to a world in which human-beings and nonhuman-beings are connected through their interactions. In the same way, Jung and Yoo’s work is closely interconnected, each of them sharing the same fundamental orientation.

The COVID-19 has now been part of our lives for two years. Was this contagion really a sudden “event”? Other cracks have started to form in our lives, in areas ranging from fine particle dust and the energy crisis to food and agriculture crises and plastic garbage. The individual events that surround us seem scattered, yet they are really too vast to be perceived all at once. To perceive all the complex interactions of worlds that appear chaotic and splintered, and how interconnected our bodies are with other bodies, Eunsoon Yoo and Haejung Jung raise their antennae on a journey to understand other beings—and they invite the viewer to join them on their travels.

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¹ The title of this introduction is a slight twist on the name of Karen Barad’s 「Meeting the Universe Halfway」. When we break away from the geopolitically founded anthropocentric hierarchy, the Earth has no center, and a centerless Earth requires efforts and cooperation for different beings to approach each other’s center in order to understand one another.
² Donna J. Haraway, 「Staying with the Trouble」, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 10.
³ The word “trouble” comes from the Rwandan 'tera+ubura', referring to the shaking or disrupted equilibrium of something standing upright.
⁴In spite of their common interests, Haejung Jung and Eunsoon Yoo also had their differences of perspective, but over the course of many conversations they each sought to understand the other. Their “travel” together was also a form of “trouble.”