Jung Jae-ho in his distinctive work modifies elements of art and blends aspects of heterogeneity. Jung works away from generally accepted ideas, and blurs the boundaries of several genres. He contemplates positively the production and consumption of images, specially highlighting not only its result, but also its process.
 
Jung’s work has its origin in his wall painting, or namely work using pre-pasted wallpaper, through which his presence has become known to the art world. After completing study in the USA, and returning to Korea by 2004, Jung engaged in works conflating space with artificiality, using intense hues found in pre-pasted wallpaper, on huge walls, raising issues of two and three dimensionality; painting and installation; eternity and temporality. (But Jung did not always work in pre-pasted, wallpaper work.)
 
This solo-show “Euphoria” is divided largely into three aspects: oil painting, wall painting, (rendered on pre-pasted wallpaper), and digital drawing. From these, 12 oil paintings particularly stand out: Jung’s painting begins from his questioning memory. Past memories of common people are impure, he finds, as they are distorted considerably in accord with their situation and concerns in the moment they are recalled. It is impossible to accurately return to a point of time and action because it is all too often added with other memories, he has discovered. Memory is thus subjective, arbitrary, and not objective for Jung.
 
Jung, whose work depicts our surroundings, captures scenes he momentarily feels are impressive, in photographs, some of which he uses for his work. The photographs he chooses reflect the state of his mind when he selects them. That said, it is inevitable what he feels when photographing differs from what he feels when choosing the photographs. This is why his feeling for some becomes different, according to his immediate exterior environment, or his personal experience.
 
When drawing, Jung does not copy his photographs exactly; instead he combines several different images in pursuit of his inner state. Through this process, Jung depends on vague memories, not logical structures. Viewers can also appreciate his works of art, based on their own experience and concerns. Jung represents what he feels when taking photographs in a painterly manner, trying to revive emotions, breath, and rhythms that he feels in the present.
 
Jung’s painting does not aim to be an accurate representation of objects, despite its embracing photographic motifs. Instead, it pursues an ornamental quality; an abstraction, simplifying and patterning form, leaving painterly brush marks reinforcing determined but artificial hues, like focusing on appearances reflected in a mirror. On close examination, we can discover in his energetic paintings signage, traffic-cones, window blinds, and parasols, common objects reviving our attention within a sometimes bland urban environment with their idiosyncratic colors. In contrast with flowers, trees, and leaves, these paintings of man-made objects make people alert, and increase their inner tension.
 
This solo show is also characterized by Jung’s digital drawing work he first presents. Jung also exploits the photographs he has taken, as if in his painting work. By using diverse functions of the Photoshop, he digitally modifies these photographic images, adding or obliterating lines and forms like drawing. There are no images he ultimately pursues and all images are innumerably revised through the process of renewal and destruction. This process is digitally made by using some computer programs but can be called analogue work because it demands the artist’s manual work in some degree. Just as line delineation in painting differs from line drawing in the Photoshop, a digital nuance is naturally sensed in Jung’s work.
When one’s individual memory is transformed into painting, it meets the canvas and paints, but if this memory is addressed by Photoshop, we may conduct a wide variety of experiments before the memory meets any material, he explains. That is because the images digitally modified by using the Photoshop have no any physical volume and mass. When the memory is converted into painting, it cannot help but be influenced by already established discourse on painting. If so, is drawing freely in a virtual space like recalling past memories unrestrictedly in our minds?
 
For this show, Jung executed wall painting Euphoria by himself for seven days. He notes a spatial gap that may arise when paintings produced in a studio are displayed at a gallery space. A sense of presence is a critical contact point where the artist communicates with viewers. As his wall painting usually occupies enormous space, it brings about a sense of space, a sense of freedom, spontaneity, and catharsis. However, it is destined never to be perpetual.
 
Jung’s wall painting rendered by pre-pasted wallpaper emits impressive hues often compared with the colors of paints. He is able to render more stimulating, intricate images through an appropriation of advertisement images and commercial logos. Even if they are figurative, it is hard to distinguish them from their background scenes.
 
Jung displayed canvas paintings between the images rendered with pre-paste wallpaper at the Busan Biennale last year, thereby accounting for the inevitable relationship between painting and wall painting in a weird structure which shows the insertion of painting into wall painting. He inserts digital drawings into pre-pasted wall paper images. The temporary formation and consumption of images respond to each other, revealing the artist’s dynamic action for work creation.
 
The term ‘euphoria’ refers medially to an emotional state associated with happiness and pleasure and also means a sense of intoxication caused by drugs. He presents a visual perceptual space the viewers may undergo by processing momentary emotions he feels in his daily life in diverse methods. When appreciating his pieces at the venue, viewers may not feel any euphoria but his subtle, sensitive artistic sensibility is settled in their minds for long.

By Ryu Hanseung / Art Critic, Curator, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea