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Sunwoo Jung (1991) is a South Korean ceramic artist based in Amsterdam.
With a fascination for ceramics, and based on continued interest in everyday domestic environments, she questions the functionality, efficiency, and clarity of the society. By reconfiguring found objects and combining them with ceramics, she wishes to purposefully deconstruct their functions and convert them into equivocal beings, or to create illusionary scenes in which the presence recalls absence, leading to the imagination.
“Chairs are the most obvious and functional tools in our everyday lives. I cannot help but engage with chairs, especially when they catch my attention as rejected items on the street. As I wanted to examine these found objects more closely, I started picking them up off the street.
After a while, several questions arose. Why had they been discarded? Where and how had they existed before? How long will their lifespan be? Where would these chairs have gone if I hadn’t picked them up? But also: who am I to give them an afterlife?
I started to transform compositions and try out new combinations of chair elements. As in a work in progress, I want any kind of metamorphosis to be transitional, and not fixed. Through my interventions, the chairs lose their functionality, and a new kind of sculpture comes into being. I even wonder if and how my reconfigured chairs will find a new “rationale” for a new existence.
One day I noticed that these reconfigured chairs resemble me in a way. Looking back on my life, I feel like I’ve always existed in some kind of liminal space. In relationships between people, I often act as a buffer or mediator who is on neither side and is trying to exist in the blurry, transitional zone in between. Every once in a while, I have a vision in which my body is in the real world, but my mind is outside of reality. I keep looking for a place to hide where I won’t be exposed, afraid to be assigned to a fixed position. Yet, I constantly hesitate – in despair about my own position in society.
The artefacts I create are neither chairs nor sculptures. They are neither well-designed products nor great works of art. They are creatures that seek to survive their in-between-ness. It might well be that my chairs constitute a self-portrait.”
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