Sojung Jun
© Sojung Jun
Sojung Jun’s practice incorporating video, performance, sculpture and experiments with augmented reality, offers reflections on the antagonistic co-existence of tradition and rapid modernisation. Using a variety of means including interviews, historical sources, mythology, and the potential of technology, she seeks to undermine fixed narratives and transplant them with more complex ones. Her video Syncope is a meditation on speed, particularly of the movement of objects, ideas and people, as well as of nature and technology. Amidst constructing a surprising web of references from nomadic plantlife and indigenous musical traditions, to the Trans-Siberian Railway and Techno music, Jun portrays poets, dancers and musicians to create a non-linear experience of time and space, on the border between reality and imagination. We follow the trail of (demi)gods, sounds and plants, which the artist sees as metaphors for the intangible phenomena of culture — coaxed into coexisting with a modernised world and the infrastructures that are its driving force. Syncope is shown together with its augmented reality (AR) application, in which users can spread ‘digital seeds’ in their environment. Epiphyllum I translates this digital proliferation into an aluminium sculpture, meaning the plant manifests in three forms — physical (sculpture), digital (AR) and pictorial (film). It is based on a species of cactus, the Epiphyllum, also known as the ‘queen of the night’, which blooms for only one night, symbolising the idea that the challenges of today pave the way for the future.
“In the end, we all move at different speeds and we’ll all just live in the gap. They say if we could experience the unimaginably fast speed of light, we could travel back in time, but could we?”
Syncope, 2023
Single-channel 4K video, 32:10 min.
Courtesy the artist. Collection M HKA
Epiphyllum I, 2023
VR 3D sculpture, aluminium casted, 186 × 120 × 110 cm
Courtesy the artist