fbpx Sojung Jun | CIRCA

Sojung Jun (b.1982, Busan) is an artist based in Seoul, South Korea. She has received her BFA in Sculpture from Seoul National University and MFA in Media Art from the Graduate School of Communication & Art at Yonsei University. Using the language of video and writing, the artist is interested in creating a nonlinear space-time to awake a new awareness of history and the present or in how the changes made in physical boundaries penetrate daily sensorial experiences. In particular, she has produced works that weave and crisscross with her personal experiences by paying attention to people standing on the boundary amid the ruins of modernity and invisible voices. She has newly established what she has fragmented through interviews, historical materials and narratives appropriated from classical texts, and carries out experiments intersecting personal, psychological and aesthetic factors with political ones in life.

Circa Commissions

Sojung Jun: From Agent Orange To Intoxicating Green

Written by Dr Cleo Roberts-Komireddi

A verdant stretch of land separates the Korean Peninsula into North and South. It is four times the size of the Seoul, South Korea’s capital, and with immense wetlands and significant mountains it is one of the world’s largest conservation areas on a par with the Amazon rainforest. It has the simultaneous accolade of being the world’s most fortified border. The expansive strip is bound in barbed wire, lined with thousands of troops and laden with unexploded landmines. This is the buffer, known as the Demilitarized Zone and the Civilian Control Zone, between North and South Korea. Instituted following a ceasefire in 1953, it has lain unpeopled for over six decades.

What has been carved into the landscape to separate these nation states also connects them. While the zone provides human security, it also provides ecology security. For this  land, empty of people, has become a safe habitat for near to 2000 species of wildlife, including endangered and protected species. It contributes to regulating flooding and erosion. In sum, it is an unintentionally rich ‘living laboratory’.1 Sojung Jun’s new film, ‘Green Screen’, 2021, takes us here to her ecotopia. The radiant mirage interrupts London’s, Tokyo’s and Seoul’s architectural density. And an ostensibly lush paradise exposes itself to the many buzzing about these urban centres.2

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