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Using photography and video installation, Jeong SoYoun tells a woman’s story in the context of sexuality. Her work starts out from the interesting discovery that a picture of an eye, if vertically displayed, resembles a female sexual organ. In the vertically arranged pictures of eyes, the beholder encounters the sexualized images of numerous women, including the artist’s herself. Focusing on the fact that an object is viewed differently depending on the viewer’s particular point of view, Jeong shows that an image is not merely passively objective, but acts subjectively according to the viewer’s gaze. However, Jeong’s main interest lies not in this visual game but in its content. She has discovered a peculiar condition of female “sexuality” in the irony that an eye, which usually symbolizes contemplation and insight, can be transformed into the object of desire and lust. A constantly moving video screen with crossed images seems to speak to us. But its voice is not heard; it is a “silent cry”. Here we confront the tension between the desire to uncover deeply buried stories and the frustration of realizing that they cannot be told.

Yun, NanJie (Art History)
-Transcribe a passage from the critique of the second solo exhibition

 

 
In The Eye to See Desire, the artist transfers the image of an eye into that of a sexual organ. The image of an eye is projected over the wall and repeatedly overlapped on one another with changing direction of lights and shapes. Sensing these delicate changes, Jeong SoYoun visualizes incessantly growing sexual desire and its draft. Considering the fact that an eye is not a conventional metaphor of a female sexual organ, her approach seems more or less eccentric. However, her metaphor can be accepted as a legitimate one in that the tension between the inside and outside of the body is revealed though cleavage of flesh and that the emphasized viscousness of the cornea in an eye suggests sexual allusion. In her work, an eye becomes the expression of desire identified with the object gazed at. Therefore, the artist delivers the relation between over-flourishing objects of desire and a sexual organ hinting desire, as reference points of contemporaries. Nevertheless, an eye cannot stop being an eye even for a moment. The instant we intend to gaze at an eye as a female sexual organ like voyeurists, we confront an eye and its pupil reflecting our gaze. My identity, as a subject of voyeurism, is exposed and I cannot remain as the subject of gaze: I become the object gazed at. Desire, as in her work, tends to be curbed by penetrating eyes in the end, whether the eyes are those of God, of other people, or of myself. This restraint is possible, because desire spawns guilt in its bearer’s deep mind. Whatever the object of desire is, however, this kind of a penetrating eye is always buried in desire waiting for the moment to open and to reflect the gaze. Jeong SoYoun employs an eye as the object of desire in order to recognize these conflicts and to articulate ‘realism of desire’ in ironic ways. Her work is telling stories about the absurd situation of contemporaries, the condition promoting the absurdity-most of all desire-, and about subject which cannot help getting schizophrenic living in such tension.

Lee JuHeon (Art Critic)
[REVIEW] 1998 SUMMER P41~P42