at Our Friendly Neighbours, Korean Cultural Centre, London, UK, 8 SEP - 5 NOV, 2022
at Hacking the Gravity, Commde Design Centre, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, 29 OCT - 18 NOV, 2022
at Hacking the Gravity, Commde Design Centre, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, 29 OCT - 18 NOV, 2022
Wandering Sun, 2022. Single channel video and sound installation, Unreal engine 5, AI algorithm, NASA Earth observation data, 11'11".
When I would stand beneath those streetlights I would stare at the trees lining the road. Each of those trees had been growing somewhere else until its roots had been slashed away and it was moved to this new space, where it was forced to put down new roots and grow expressionless in the space between road and pavement. Whenever it rains or the wind blows, I feel as if those trees stand guard, acting as the true heroes of the city’s story. Is it because they’ve collected too much dust from the city? Or perhaps because of the way they stand stiffly at exact intervals perfectly spaced from each other? In their mother forests, they would have never stood this way. Clearly those trees were living things, but somehow they felt manufactured. Manufactured nature...It formed a portal of sorts. Those trees — with their perfect spaces and intervals, covered in their city dust; casting their strange shadows as they moved under the streetlights — they whispered to me about where I came from. In the middle of the night, London can be a quiet place, but the sounds of the busy city day still linger in the trees. I would walk amongst them, as they guided me through the city maze until the early hours of morning. It always felt as thought if I went just a little farther, those trees would take me to a secret place, one only they knew. A place that would take me away for a moment from the stage on which I was living. I felt almost like I was walking around inside the painting in the scroll you used to show me in your study, Grandfather. As you would unroll the scroll before me, I could see a flower a stone, a stream A snow hill a tree; and they whispered to me of things which can’t be found in the city. Those whispers must have come from some wide space outside of the study, brought from nowhere in somewhere by a gust of wind. Somewhere along the way, our concept of speed has become confused. in their understanding of space and time. As the concept of ‘lived time’ has disappeared from our age of instant information, we have become virtually unable to feel space through our senses. If we hope to not lose that in- between space, where, ever shrinking, it sits between start and finish, we will have to pay closer attention. It is said that the space between start and finish has been lost, but I yearn for that place which exists somewhere but isn’t anywhere, that ‘nowhere in somewhere’. A place like my grandfather’s garden. Is that why I miss my childhood in the shadow of Masan’s red mountains? Is it because I’ve travelled so far away —because we as people have travelled so far from the nature we were born to? Here on my plane from Somewhere to Nowhere I feel I’m starting my own journey — one that will take me through the smells and sounds of my memory to meet my grandfather. One that will take me to nowhere in somewhere.
Sun, Manufactured Nature
Juyong Park (Ph.D in Theoretical Physics, Professor of Culture Technology at KAIST)
Humans cannot escape Nature. In a physicist’s terms, Nature is the space-time continuum, an all-encompassing template, where all our experiences take place. The inevitability of Nature breeds familiarity; Even when we are engulfed with a sense of awe and admiration at the sight of exceptional natural beauty, we expect Nature to be what it has always been.
In Jinjoon Lee’s creation Wandering Sun, we are presented with a strikingly beautiful ‘natural’ scenery of the sun doing its celestial navigation. The reflections and refractions of the sunlight shone on the clouds and the ocean surface are also undeniably real.
Humans cannot escape Nature. In a physicist’s terms, Nature is the space-time continuum, an all-encompassing template, where all our experiences take place. The inevitability of Nature breeds familiarity; Even when we are engulfed with a sense of awe and admiration at the sight of exceptional natural beauty, we expect Nature to be what it has always been.
In Jinjoon Lee’s creation Wandering Sun, we are presented with a strikingly beautiful ‘natural’ scenery of the sun doing its celestial navigation. The reflections and refractions of the sunlight shone on the clouds and the ocean surface are also undeniably real.
But in time we discover that the natural here is not a true Nature; the Sun, that almighty source of energy, the singular natural thing that allows us to see and feel the natural world, ambles along the boundary of the screen—a wholly unnatural manner of movement— belying its true mode of birth in the hands of a human creator.
Wandering Sun thus shows distinct identities depending on the two timescales we allow it: In one, a short timescale, the scenery resides as a hyper-realistic ‘snapshot’, and in the other, a long extended one, it that teaches us that its ‘natural’ beauty is but a human creation.
This unsettling paradox is a stark reminder that Nature and technology are seamless conjoined in our times, challenging our conception of what it means to be ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’. It is now improbable that we could even return to the simpler times they could be easily told apart—we have no choice, against our longing for the comfort of the familiar, but to recalibrate our understanding of natural beauty.
Is this a price we pay for daring to manipulate Nature when we are merely one of its creatures? Or is it a reward that lies just beyond the horizon of Wandering Sun for daring to create a new Nature?
Artist Jinjoon Lee
Art Director Sun Kim
Producer Doyo Choi, Bona Lee
Sungbaek Kim
Support
Korean Cultural Centre UK (KCCUK)
Art Center Nabi