15th Doosan Yonkang Arts Award Winner Jeong Yeoreum Solo Exhibition [Plural]

Doosan Gallery at Doosan Art Center presents “Plural,” a solo exhibition by Jung Yeoreum, recipient of the 15th Doosan Yonkang Arts Award, from 8. 26 (Wed) to 10. 17 (Sat). Centered on a new video work of the same title, the exhibition traverses East Asia's Cold War history, from Korea and Vietnam to the Trans-Siberian Railway crossing Russia, examining the logic of an unidentifiable power and the individuals moving dynamically within it.

Through prolonged observation of and research into places, Jung Yeoreum has dismantled the temporal strata beneath them. Her gaze is a persistent inquiry into ways of seeing. In earlier works, she explored ways to see places she could not directly visit or view, using optical devices and technologies of war. In recent years, she has compared and contrasted records of historicized places with their present landscapes, seeking to capture forgotten memories and discordant spaces and times. Interweaving public archives, private memories, and speculative imagination, she layers traces of different times and places into a single narrative.

Where does power come from? Who possesses it?

The new work “Plural” (2026) begins with the discovery of a person's autobiography.1 In the early 1920s, he left his homeland for the first time in search of his father, embarking on a long journey of movement. With Vietnam as his main stage, he drifted along the political tidal waves sweeping across East Asia. As autobiographies often do, the account of his life, written with a measure of truth and some exaggeration, appears to be a succession of choices guided by clear ideologies or values. Yet his movements, driven by the circumstances confronting him, feel less self-directed than like being carried along. Within a fierce vortex of power, he was first a voluntary migrant who relocated for reasons such as family and business, then a collaborator faithfully serving the regime, then part of the masses stripped of everything by an even greater power, and finally an emigrant who turned his back on his homeland.

Within the conventions of documentary, the video appears to faithfully follow the trajectory of the individual described in the autobiography. Yet through the narrator's voice, Jung singles out moments when historical reverberations intersect with his particular choices. On screen, various footage of those events is followed by the places as they are today. Scenes differing in both texture and aspect ratio are connected seamlessly, without jarring joins. Between them move countless people who passed through the same time. As the scenes continue and the gaze draws back, the individual gradually disappears, leaving in his place beings whose names and faces cannot be identified.

If there is an individual who has become a mass within the video, outside it are individuals who have lost any place to return to. The text-centered installations “Shepherd” (2026) and “Apron in a Low Place” (2026) feature figures who have lost their purpose, or never had one in the first place.

The speaker in “Shepherd” is a woman with the foul underarm odor she inherited from her mother. Boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway without a precise destination, she thinks about where she has come from and where she must go. Smell has the power to summon a particular past in an instant, yet its meaning changes each time depending on who smells it, their memories, and their circumstances. Clutching only the intangible trace of smell as evidence of herself, she wanders through the landscape to lose her sense of direction. She believes that only her moving self can become her own homeland.

There is also someone who, subordinate to another, makes satisfying that person their calling. The speaker in “Apron in a Low Place” has nothing else, but lives serving a master with 2 hands capable of grasping anything. Yet for this person, who has made serving the master the entirety of life, the acts committed to satisfy the master produce the paradox of taking away that life altogether. Unexpected shifts in power overturn relationships and continually reposition the individuals within them.

Singular beings that constitute a plurality wander here and there without being given names. What can we call them? Jung Yeoreum looks at those left behind where power has swept through, and at every individual trying to break free of that place. Through their movements, she attempts to point somewhere, or toward something. No one can know precisely what is there or whether that direction is right. Landscapes bleached by the ghostlike word “everyday” flow past. Yet faces still remain within them. When power changes direction, everyone becomes an observer and a witness to one another. We must find the language to call them.

* Jeon Yeongsang, “Following Roads, Following Time: A Lifetime of Service” (CREART, 2010)

— Yoo Jinyoung (Curator)

Jung Yeoreum (b.1994) is an artist who narrates stories about the relationship between place and memory through video. She has held the solo exhibitions “A Century in the Distant Fog” (SeMA Bunker, Seoul, 2023) and “HAPPY TIME IS GOOD” (Hapjeongjigu, Seoul, 2021), and participated in Doosan Art Lab Exhibition 2024 (Doosan Gallery, Doosan Art Center, Seoul, 2024). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2026, Warsaw, Poland), HITE Collection (2023, Seoul), Space Heem (2022, Busan), and SeMA Nam-Seoul Museum of Art (2021, Seoul), among others. Her works have screened at numerous major film festivals, including the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Seoul International Women's Film Festival, and Jeonju International Film Festival. She received the 15th Doosan Yonkang Arts Award in the visual arts category in 2024.

※ “Plural” is screened at 70-minute intervals.