Jeong Heewoo paints and records Gangnam Daero
Park Young-taek | Professor of art criticism at Kyunggi University
The bus passed Bang Bang Intersection and stops at Wooseung Apartments. Buses stop and leave from designated stops that are named after the neighborhood. Someone gets off and some people get on. The artist was waiting for me at a bus stop on Gangnam Daero wearing a brightly-colored waistcoat. It seemed as if she had put it on especially, so that I could find her easily. We went to a nearby building, got on the elevator and went to her studio on the ninth floor. Her studio is located at number 901 on a 18-story building at 377, Gangnam Daero. We all live and work in places that are numbered. Living in a city means that we occupy abstract spaces that have been indexed. Numbers appear on various documents representing one's life such as the family register. The value and how big one's home is represents one's life these days and one's address is merely an indicator of how well-off someone is. An unseen flow of capital defines one's space. A city is where competition for space is at its most fierce.
Gangnam Daero is seen from the window of her studio. The studio has a fantastic view. It's a perfect place to look outside and engage one's mind with imagination. Cities provide us with an enormous amount of things to see in that aspect. As long as you have a big, transparent window, the city gives you an endless flow of different scenes, satisfying our curiosity and our voyeuristic desires. From the artist's window, countless buildings, trees, signposts, roads and cars driving past can be seen. Unlike scenes from nature, the endless noise and movement, the majestic presence and speed of objects come at you like a hallucination. They keep appearing and disappearing in massive flows. They're not uniform but sporadic, fragmented and abstract. The walls are covered with maps from the realty agent's showing the area in detail as well as photos and drawings by the artist. It almost looks like those of a realty agent's office. The studio is an archive where the artist surveys, maps and documents her surrounding area. It is the center of her work where she defines her work and at the same time, her work involves taking her surroundings as the theme and observing, surveying the area as she walks in it and gives meanings to it. She embraces her own direct experiences of seeing and living in the area into her work.
She drew in great detail the area surrounding Gangnam Daero using Google Earth, navigation systems as well as maps, camera and video. To all this, she adds experiences from her own walks and sketches. It's a map/painting created by machines and the recognition by the human body. Elements from bodily and out-of-body experiences as well as expansions beyond the body all co-exist in this work. She stays faithful to what she experienced with her body and compliments any insufficiencies using other means. The result is a map as well as a landscape painting. It's also a pictorial diary as well as an indexed reference book about one's private space. It also has ethnological aspects in that it's a detailed study of one's current surroundings and how one is living at this very moment. Just like the renowned Korean cartographer Kim Jeong-ho, the artist walked up and down Gangnam Daero down to Yangje Station countless times and put everything there, including the buildings, trees, signposts and the people into her work. In order to record a city, she didn't use the perspective projection style, but drew the map as seen from above. and from the perspective of a walker. Many different perspectives co-exist in the work. One is reminded of old maps or paintings of royal parades from the Joseon Dynasty.
In the view of this artist, it is impossible to record every single element that exist in the city. Rather, the city has organic chunks that flow here and there, just like parts of a machine. She portrays the flows of these organic chunks in her work and to do this she picked as her theme Gangnam Daero and its surrounding area and portrayed it as a map. She measured the distances between building by walking between them and to draw roads, she went to the top of buildings and photographed them looking down. She documented road signs by drawing them and she photographed people, cars and trees from a height of 5 to 10 meters from the ground. She made use of cameras and video cameras in her work. She recorded how many stories each building has as well as all the sign posts that she could see. This strong obsession with what one sees, the desire to record and document what one sees is a reflection of the consciousness of being alive and a passion for the moment. It's the meaning behind the endless questions about all things that exist and the self that is not separated from these and accepting one's significance within the context of one's surroundings.
Below the immobile buildings, countless people move and countless cars go up and down the road covered with black tar. What are all these people thinking as they go their different ways? Where are they going? Who are they meeting? What do they all do? Is there someone I know in the crowd? Who are in those buildings and cars and what's happening there? Are they all living in this city the same way I am? When we look at the city, these thoughts cross our minds. And the artist couldn't just sit and think so she decided to go out. And by walking on the road with the people, she took in everything she saw and put it in her work.
The artist records on Jangji in pencil the buildings, trees, roads, cars, traffic signs and the people there including all the symbols and numbers. The surface of the Jangji replaces the colors of the buildings and she put in some colors partially using ink. Things that were drawn and weren't drawn co-exist and you can see the skin of the paper in places. Other parts have been painted and some parts have a 360 degree view like a hallucination, combining the real and hyperreal. There are no shadows or four-dimensional aspects to the work and the artist's subjectivity or emotions have been put aside by using pale colors and silhouettes. The city is reborn not as a conventional landscape painting but in a work that combines perspectives from traditional Korean landscape paintings and microscopic experiences, ethnographic elements as well as the artist's personal struggle of living in an urban environment in this day and age.
Park Young-taek | Professor of art criticism at Kyunggi University
The bus passed Bang Bang Intersection and stops at Wooseung Apartments. Buses stop and leave from designated stops that are named after the neighborhood. Someone gets off and some people get on. The artist was waiting for me at a bus stop on Gangnam Daero wearing a brightly-colored waistcoat. It seemed as if she had put it on especially, so that I could find her easily. We went to a nearby building, got on the elevator and went to her studio on the ninth floor. Her studio is located at number 901 on a 18-story building at 377, Gangnam Daero. We all live and work in places that are numbered. Living in a city means that we occupy abstract spaces that have been indexed. Numbers appear on various documents representing one's life such as the family register. The value and how big one's home is represents one's life these days and one's address is merely an indicator of how well-off someone is. An unseen flow of capital defines one's space. A city is where competition for space is at its most fierce.
Gangnam Daero is seen from the window of her studio. The studio has a fantastic view. It's a perfect place to look outside and engage one's mind with imagination. Cities provide us with an enormous amount of things to see in that aspect. As long as you have a big, transparent window, the city gives you an endless flow of different scenes, satisfying our curiosity and our voyeuristic desires. From the artist's window, countless buildings, trees, signposts, roads and cars driving past can be seen. Unlike scenes from nature, the endless noise and movement, the majestic presence and speed of objects come at you like a hallucination. They keep appearing and disappearing in massive flows. They're not uniform but sporadic, fragmented and abstract. The walls are covered with maps from the realty agent's showing the area in detail as well as photos and drawings by the artist. It almost looks like those of a realty agent's office. The studio is an archive where the artist surveys, maps and documents her surrounding area. It is the center of her work where she defines her work and at the same time, her work involves taking her surroundings as the theme and observing, surveying the area as she walks in it and gives meanings to it. She embraces her own direct experiences of seeing and living in the area into her work.
She drew in great detail the area surrounding Gangnam Daero using Google Earth, navigation systems as well as maps, camera and video. To all this, she adds experiences from her own walks and sketches. It's a map/painting created by machines and the recognition by the human body. Elements from bodily and out-of-body experiences as well as expansions beyond the body all co-exist in this work. She stays faithful to what she experienced with her body and compliments any insufficiencies using other means. The result is a map as well as a landscape painting. It's also a pictorial diary as well as an indexed reference book about one's private space. It also has ethnological aspects in that it's a detailed study of one's current surroundings and how one is living at this very moment. Just like the renowned Korean cartographer Kim Jeong-ho, the artist walked up and down Gangnam Daero down to Yangje Station countless times and put everything there, including the buildings, trees, signposts and the people into her work. In order to record a city, she didn't use the perspective projection style, but drew the map as seen from above. and from the perspective of a walker. Many different perspectives co-exist in the work. One is reminded of old maps or paintings of royal parades from the Joseon Dynasty.
In the view of this artist, it is impossible to record every single element that exist in the city. Rather, the city has organic chunks that flow here and there, just like parts of a machine. She portrays the flows of these organic chunks in her work and to do this she picked as her theme Gangnam Daero and its surrounding area and portrayed it as a map. She measured the distances between building by walking between them and to draw roads, she went to the top of buildings and photographed them looking down. She documented road signs by drawing them and she photographed people, cars and trees from a height of 5 to 10 meters from the ground. She made use of cameras and video cameras in her work. She recorded how many stories each building has as well as all the sign posts that she could see. This strong obsession with what one sees, the desire to record and document what one sees is a reflection of the consciousness of being alive and a passion for the moment. It's the meaning behind the endless questions about all things that exist and the self that is not separated from these and accepting one's significance within the context of one's surroundings.
Below the immobile buildings, countless people move and countless cars go up and down the road covered with black tar. What are all these people thinking as they go their different ways? Where are they going? Who are they meeting? What do they all do? Is there someone I know in the crowd? Who are in those buildings and cars and what's happening there? Are they all living in this city the same way I am? When we look at the city, these thoughts cross our minds. And the artist couldn't just sit and think so she decided to go out. And by walking on the road with the people, she took in everything she saw and put it in her work.
The artist records on Jangji in pencil the buildings, trees, roads, cars, traffic signs and the people there including all the symbols and numbers. The surface of the Jangji replaces the colors of the buildings and she put in some colors partially using ink. Things that were drawn and weren't drawn co-exist and you can see the skin of the paper in places. Other parts have been painted and some parts have a 360 degree view like a hallucination, combining the real and hyperreal. There are no shadows or four-dimensional aspects to the work and the artist's subjectivity or emotions have been put aside by using pale colors and silhouettes. The city is reborn not as a conventional landscape painting but in a work that combines perspectives from traditional Korean landscape paintings and microscopic experiences, ethnographic elements as well as the artist's personal struggle of living in an urban environment in this day and age.
