Installation view of 《The Plural》 © DOOSAN Gallery
DOOSAN
Art Center DOOSAN Gallery presents 《The Plural》, a solo
exhibition by Yeoreum Jeong, the recipient of the 15th DOOSAN Yonkang Arts
Awards, on view through October 17.
Centering
on a new video work of the same title, the exhibition explores the indefinable
logic of power operating across East Asian Cold War history—encompassing Korea,
Vietnam, and extending along the Trans-Siberian Railway—and the individuals
moving within it.
Yeoreum
Jeong engages in long observation of and research into places, breaking down
the layers of time underneath them. Her gaze becomes a tenacious exploration of
our ways of seeing. In her previous work, she examined the use of visual
apparatus and war technology to see places that could not be visited or
observed directly.
Over
the past few years, she has compared and contrasted the records and current
landscapes of historical places to capture forgotten memories and discordant
times and places. Crossing public archives with personal memories and
speculative imagination, she has juxtaposed traces of different times and
places within a single narrative.
Installation view of 《The Plural》 © DOOSAN Gallery
Jeong’s
new work The Plural (2026) began with the discovery of an
autobiography. The video uses the language of documentary in a way that
suggests it is faithfully following the course of events described in the
autobiography. But Jeong also employs the voice of a narrator, excerpting
moments when specific choices by the Person intersect with the waves of
history.
The
screen shows footage of the associated events and present-day places, as images
of different textures and proportions are woven together sleekly and
seamlessly. Moving amid all of these are thousands of people who passed through
the same time. The more distant the gaze becomes, the more the individual
disappears, replaced by presences whose names and faces cannot be known.
Installation view of 《The Plural》 © DOOSAN Gallery
While some individuals are reduced to
masses in the video, others outside the frame were left with nowhere to return
to. The figures in the text-centered installation works The
Shepherd (2026) and Apron of the Low Place (2026)
have either lost their purposes or never had them to begin with.
The singular who make up “the plural”
drift about without names of their own. By what names might we call them?
Yeoreum Jeong observes the people left behind where forces have swept through,
and all the many individuals who seek to break through their own places.
Through their movements, Jeong attempts to point toward someplace or something.
No one can know for sure what exists there or whether the direction is the
right one.
