What it means to see through the subjects one encounters
Perceiving time as a single space, reconstructing one year anew
Perigee Gallery, located on Banpo-daero in Seoul, is holding Jeon Myeong-eun's solo exhibition <The Winter I Hold> through May 7.
Jeon Myeong-eun is an artist who ceaselessly asks what it means to see through the subjects she encounters. She has pursued photographic work that reveals, in condensed forms and images, the multilayered meanings that exist behind the elements found in the particular subjects she observes. For the artist, such work is an act of capturing what emerges naturally in the process of growing familiar with various people, objects, and landscapes and narrowing the distance to them.
This exhibition, <The Winter I Hold>, fully reveals the artist's attitude of perceiving time as a single space. Hinting at a story about the seasons through its title, the exhibition begins in the spring that has returned after passing through winter. In addition, the titles of the individual works on display are all composed of the name of one month from January to December, suggesting that the artist is reconstructing one year of time anew through the things perceived by way of the beings around her. This emerges in situations of sharing the parts that form relationships at the deepest reaches of life in the past, present, and future, and it appears within a space-time made up of various beings, including the 'I' who takes the photographs.
The works on display show no direct links to one another and give a fragmentary impression, and this arrangement resembles the way we reconstruct experience. Experiences are connected—sometimes loosely, sometimes intricately—through the flow of time that intersects irregularly. This may stem from a concrete narrative, but it is also strongly perceived through invisible elements such as the weather and atmosphere of a given day. In the works, we come to see figures, objects, and landscapes that wholly hold the flow of light and air that filled that space during the span of time from January to December. In this way, what the artist attends to is not a specially focused subject but a space where time is rendered into an image.
Ultimately, this body of work is a trace of Jeon Myeong-eun's endless contemplation of what relationships she forms with the countless things she encounters alongside herself, and of how she captures this in photographs to create meaning. Rather than relying on sight alone, she strives to express in photographs a sense of things we cannot actually know, things that are unseen, and the many things not captured on the screen.
Her photographs can also be seen as a process of making visible the various flows and vibrations that come alive within the web of relationships between herself, others, and the world. What we must read in her work is the air that the 'I' who is the subject of the photograph and the 'them' beyond the camera created as they connected with one another during the shooting process—the flow that place possessed—and to feel this, the viewer needs an experience of the various senses inherent within themselves. May this exhibition, filled with the artist's yearlong journey, become an experience of leaving fresh traces upon each person's own space-time through a horizontal gaze in which one faithfully reflects the other. 070-4676-7096
