Photographer Jeong Kyungja (b. 1974) captures fleeting sensory moments in everyday life—whether in the city, nature, or among people—through her camera. Her photographs do not seem to involve any special techniques but instead clearly reveal the subject, evoking a sense of intuition.

Jeong’s working process is just as intuitive as her photography. Using a minimalistic digital camera, she captures moments encountered in reality through spontaneous snapshots. Rather than preparing and staging scenes for her photos, she allows the images to unfold as they appear and as she feels them.

She focuses on beings that seem disconnected from ordinary spaces of daily life: objects that have lost their place, things that are alive yet seem as though they've already lost their vitality, and entities that are incomplete and impermanent.

In her Spiegel im Spiegel (2007) series, the subjects reflect moments of oppression from reality and fragments of dark, deep-seated memories. The artist chose objects that allowed her to project her inner self, describing the process as a constant introspection and the resulting images as portraits of her self-consciousness.

The Spiegel im Spiegel series is connected to the artist’s past, dreams, and unconscious mind, ultimately touching on what she perceives as ‘death.’ The combination of several photographs—fragmented images from everyday life that may or may not be related—was intended to create an unpredictable, interconnected narrative.

In her Story within a Story (2010-2011) series, produced during her studies in the UK, she captured moments of connection with objects she encountered by chance in reality, using a traditional straight photography approach. Through these objects, the artist tells stories of her sensory experiences of another world within real spaces.

The subjects of Story within a Story are familiar objects and scenes that one might ordinarily pass by unnoticed in daily life. For example, windows, cobwebs, dead insects, buoys on the sea, and flower trees are depicted clearly, just as they are. The objects captured by the artist’s camera are chosen from deeply subjective moments. Rather than intending to directly instruct or convey something specific, she photographs what catches her attention and stimulates her senses.

Meanwhile, the Speaking of Now series (2012-2013) is a confession of the experiences of life and death that a close friend of the artist went through. Jeong Kyungja captured the boundary between life and death and the moments in between, using a tender yet warm perspective, through images of her ailing friend and surrounding objects.

In her Language of Time (2013-2014) series, Jeong captured objects in abandoned spaces, frozen in time. This work portrays disappearing entities, suspending them in a moment where they are neither fully alive nor entirely extinct. In other words, Language of Time is a project that documents the cyclical process of creation, growth, and eventual dissolution through the medium of photography.

In the Elegant Town (2015-2016) series, fragmented images encountered in urban spaces are combined. The images in the photographs create a contradictory atmosphere, for example, juxtaposing the vibrant green of nature with the stark, towering buildings of a newly developed city.

The subtle recombination of familiar landscapes from unnamed places does not clearly indicate or signify a specific meaning. Instead, it leaves room for diverse interpretations depending on the viewer’s perspective.

And Jeong introduced the Drifting (2016-2019) series, in which she captured anonymous spaces that have lost their distinctiveness. The landscapes in this series depict large residential complexes, churches, and their surrounding areas. Though these are spaces where many people pass through, in her photographs, they appear as if they are abandoned ruins or artificial model buildings.

As she wandered through the city, the artist was prompted by questions such as, "Does that building have a past? Does it have a future? Will it be remembered in history?" These thoughts led her to capture these landscapes. The portraits of cities, stripped of their memories and histories due to indiscriminate urban development, are captured as images of buildings that seem to float without depth or substance.

The So, Suite (2018) series captures the interior of a 25-year-old hotel suite. A hotel is a transient space, where daily memories are bleached away like the freshly laundered white sheets changed every day. Despite its long 25-year history, the past of this space holds no significance to the anonymous guests who stay there. Jeong sought to capture the fading, forgotten memories embedded in every corner of the suite, which no one would find or remember again.

In 2021, during the pandemic, she presented the Nevertheless series, which captured the changing landscapes of everyday life, likening them to nature. The images in Nevertheless feature scenes of blooming cherry blossoms, trees that have shed their leaves, winter mountains covered in white snow, the ceaseless waves of the sea, and the sky. All of these elements, standing in their place with nothing of their own, continually empty and fill with time, embodying change.

In her 2021 solo exhibition “Serene Days” at Gallery Jinsun, Jeong Kyungja selected photographs from both So, Suite and Nevertheless, printing them in various sizes and arranging them in an overlapping display. Time always flows the same, and nature quietly changes. By juxtaposing the artificial with the natural, the artist reflects on life and the repetition of daily life that persist even during the pandemic.

In this way, Jeong Kyungja's photographs capture traces of memories or hidden stories embedded in the ordinary landscapes of daily life. The collected fragments of everyday life are displayed in varying sizes and tones or juxtaposed with other images, creating new moments of interaction with the audience. Through this interaction, a third narrative—different from the original story—is continually generated.

"My photographs commonly contain stories hidden within time and space. These stories are sensed and remembered through my perceptions. Sensation becomes the beginning of memory and the stimulus that allows me to perceive the world, resulting in images that become imprinted on me.

Each of these dissected images of the world can be seen as a concealed expression of reality, and through the reassembly of these fragmented images, I seek the possibility of another narrative.” 

Jeong Kyungja studied photography at Chung-Ang University and Graduate School, and graduated with an M.A. in Contemporary Art from the University of Edinburgh, UK. She won the Grand Prize at the 23rd Gwangju Shinsegae Art Festival Award (2022) and the 5th Ilwoo Photo Prize (2013), and has held more than 15 solo exhibitions, including “Another Face” (Museum Hanmi Samcheong Annex, 2023), “Boundary” (Space 22, 2019), and “The Roots of Coincidence” (Ilwoo Space, 2014).

She has participated in several group exhibitions at various domestic and international institutions including Weltkunstzimmer (Düsseldorf, 2022), Nam Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2018), Platform Changdong 61 (Seoul, 2017), and Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2017). Her works are in the collections of the Jeonnam Museum of Art, Goeun Museum of Photography, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Art Bank, and the books include The Roots of Coincidence (Ilwoo Foundation, 2014) and In between Something and Nothing (Hezuk Press, 2012), and her photographic work is featured in the essay A Silence Passion (Maumsancheck, 2004).

References

• 정경자, Jeong Kyungja (Artist Website)
• K-ARTIST.COM, 정경자 (Jeong Kyungja)
• 박건희문화재단, 정경자, spiegel im spiegel (거울속의 거울), 2007 (Parkgeonhi Foundation, Jeong Kyungja, spiegel im spiegel, 2007)
• 일우재단, 2013 일우사진상 수상자 정경자 사진전
• 정은정, 공간의 표정, 기억의 언어
• 갤러리진선, 조용한 날들 (Gallery Jinsun, Serene Days)
• SPACE 22, 감각의 경계 (Boundary)