Installation view of 《It Goes by No Name》 © Alternative Space LOOP
Alternative Space LOOP is presenting
Sangwoon Jung's solo exhibition 《It Goes by No Name》 through August 1.
Working across photography, installation,
video, and publishing, Jung has explored labor and migration across
generations, the enduring traces of colonialism and the Cold War, and the
position of queer bodies marginalized within these historical hierarchies.
Installation view of 《It Goes by No Name》 © Alternative Space LOOP
The exhibition begins with the artist's
experience of presiding over his father's funeral as the chief mourner after
his passing last autumn. The unfamiliar experience of mourning as someone whose
body falls outside the lineage of familial succession extends beyond the
private grief of a single family.
Layered within it are the traces left on
individual bodies and relationships by colonial rule, national division,
state-led overseas labor migration, and patriarchal systems of inheritance.
Following the words the artist was never able to say to his father, the
exhibition traces the process through which one who is left behind—yet has no
name to pass on—comes to forge a personal language of mourning.
Installation view of 《It Goes by No Name》 © Alternative Space LOOP
Jung has practised cruising—the act of
walking or driving through a locality in search of chance encounters within the
gay community—as a way of bringing his body into contact with the city and its
interstices. For Jung, the city is both a body in which collective history has
become materialized and the visible surface of social order.
Sites whose functions have ceased or whose
purposes have been erased—such as ruins, construction sites, historical
remains, and walls—become liminal zones where bodies pushed beyond the
boundaries of normalcy and productivity can briefly reside.
The artist brings his own body into contact
with these spaces, leaning against them, pressing into them, and rubbing
against their surfaces, forging an intimate encounter with place.
《It Goes by No Name》 asks what a body that does not continue a family line is able to
remember, and what it can choose to sever. It considers how one might gradually
alter the course of one's trajectory without ever fully breaking away from the
past.
