Seoul Fiction (production still), 2010
Super 16mm Film Transferred to HD Video; color, stereo sound, Approx. 15', Co-Produced with SAMUSO, Seoul. Photo by Tae-Dong KIM © Jun YANG
Taishin Project:”Seoul Fiction or an Installation for a Public Space”
A Solo Exhibition by Jun Yang
Essay by Yu-Chien Wu / Translation by Bonnie Huie
Architecture sustains the weight of a city's history, reflects the unique characteristics of its local culture, and bears witness to social change. A longtime overseas resident of Austria, artist Jun Yang has frequently traveled across the globe to countless different cities, creating works that can be located within criss-crossing, mutually permeating trajectories. Discerning urban architecture, skyline, and the differences between landscapes becoming what he recognizes as the first thread between unfamiliar cultures, Jun Yang has taken what is merely an impressionist mode and transformed it into an element of his artworks.
Video Installation:”Seoul Fiction or an Installation for a Public Space”
Enter the first-floor lobby of Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture, and you'll find it brimming with gray porcelain structures of varying sizes, great and small. The space overhead has been converted into an architectural model of a residential community, suggestive of the high-rise apartment complexes designed for mass living that were popular in Taiwan in 1960s and 70s. Flat-panel screens are mounted to the wall, as if to resemble the wall of televisions that one commonly finds at enormous commercial shopping centers. The porcelain is coated with outdoor surface tile, recalling the rapid economic growth of those decades as well as the tint of gray skies within the metaphorical city. Artist Jun Yang takes an individual's first impression of Taipei as his starting point, as if it were the prologue to this project.
Playing on the screens is Jun Yang's 2010 video work Seoul Fiction, a collaborative production made with the support of Artsonje Center and the curatorial collective Samuso, and shot on 16mm film. The film depicts the beginning of a journey by an elderly Korean couple from a small rural town surrounded by forest and hills. The couple set out to visit their grown children who live and work in the city, and whom they have not seen in a long time.
Jun Yang shot Seoul Fiction in the manner of two distinctly stylized films by great masters: Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu's definitive work Tokyo Story (1953) and Play Time (1967), a film by French comedic actor and director Jacques Tati. In Tokyo Story, Ozu masterfully handles plebian everyday life through an emphasis on his own technique. Depicting an elderly couple who have traveled to Tokyo to visit their married children, however each of whom insists that they are far too busy to personally attend to their guests. The unseen journey in the middle of the story is expounded upon in Jun Yang's Seoul Fiction from the perspective of a Korean couple, who have traveled from the suburbs of Seoul to the city center. On a highway bus from which changing scenery can be seen rushing past windows, blue skies are gradually supplanted by a homogenized culture of suburban townships. The technique of a plotless narrative accompanies the everyday dialogue of family life, depicting husband and wife as they try to understand the complicated lives of the modern people residing there. A metaphor for the generational differences between conflicting value systems, it indirectly comments upon all the various conflicts brought about by modernization, the emergence of the city, and rapid construction.
The sparse signage found in public venues is used extensively, as if to construct a virtual theatre in which the audience must lift their eyes to the screen. The actors' movements appear scripted, especially reminiscent of techniques in Jacques Tati's self-starring, self-directed Play Time. In the film, Tati pokes fun at brand-new modern buildings and their seeming homogenization of everyday life. He predicts well in advance all kinds of challenges confronted by globalization. In Jun Yang's imagined fable, man constructs scenic illusions from towering dreams, so that he can observe the intrinsic functionalism of all Asian metropolises, and bring exteriority and its deviant phenomena into question.
Toward the end of the film, on the evening trip home, the elderly wife can't stop asking, “Is this the place where we went last year?” to which the elderly husband responds, “Don't look back. The past will be fine. A past by moving forward. A memory that lies in the future.” The past and the present are misplaced within the continuum of time and space, and contemporary man has, after following the figurative footsteps of progress and change, found himself in a particular state of instability with the sense of drawing ever more distant.
The artist intentionally blurs film and video art through an imagined narrative, a metaphor for his examination of memory and urban phenomena. As the work demonstrates, the use of installation space allows the audience to situate themselves on an imaginary outdoor rooftop, from a vantage point looking downwards. Within the film, architectural space and time are transformed, and the vague spatiotemporal boundary extends from the recorded work into 'real time.’
One Day Event—video screening and dialogue
The first part of this art project at Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture features the video installation: "Seoul Fiction or an Installation for a Public Space.” Its second part is the "One Day Event"—the screening of three films investigating urban history and memories by the artist: Seoul Fiction(Seoul, 2010), Norwegian Woods (Norway, 2008) and A Short Story about Remembering and Forgetting (Taiwan, 2007) as well as the discussion of the artist and art critic Professor Jianhong Huang.
Norwegian Woods depicts its heroine as she returns home to Norway to sort out her deceased mother's belongings. The sorting of objects functions as the metaphor of individual memory, evoked to be preserved or discarded. Passersby wearing her mother's clothes attract the daughter's gaze, educing the notion of déjà vu that the Artist concerns about. The notion of déjà vu originates from Haruki Murkami's novel Norwegian Wood. On the other hand, reality and imagination were blurred due to the use of drugs described in The Beatles' song Norwegian Wood (1965). Therefore, both déjà vu and virtual reality blur the happenings in the film. A Short Story about Remembering and Forgetting depicts a night in the city of Taipei as if it were a hub with no sense of time, in the manner of an insomniac's monologue. On the walk along Tianjin Road from the planned district of Xinyi, signboards twinkle like Christmas lights. The sense of space has been compressed down to an opaque world of fantasy, and an individual's memory and historical conditions become intertwined.
After the film, the artist took part in a dialogue with art critic Professor Huang on the subject of artists’concerns about images in the present day, which included the convergence of film and video art, the installation of images in various spaces, and reproduction within various contexts, thus examining the meaning of production.
About the Artist
Jun Yang
Born in China in 1975. Immigrated to Austria with his family at the age of 4. Currently lives and works in three locations: Vienna, Yokohoma, and Taipei. His works encompass various mediums—including film, installation art, publications, symposia, and even the new development of public spaces—while interminably addressing the problem to institutions, societies, and audiences, calling into question whether reality is, in fact, ‘real.’
His previous exhibitions include the 51st Venice Biennale (Italy, 2004), the Liverpool Biennial (England, 2006), Manifesta 4 (Germany, 2002), and the Marseille International Festival of Documentary Film (France, 2001). His commissioned large-scale, public art projects include gfzk Garden, a garden for Museum for Contemporary Art Leipzig, as well as Paris Syndrome Café, a set of renovation plans for a café, the University of Bern's Sports and Physical Education Center, and the new City Hall in Innsbruck, Austria, among others.
Exhibition
Part 1
Video Installation:”Seoul Fiction or an Installation for a Public Space”
Dates: October 24 –December 9, 2011
Monday to Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Location: Taishin Tower, 1st Floor, No. 118, Sec.4, Renai Road, Da'an District, Taipei
Part 2
One Day Event—video screening and dialogue
Screening films: Seoul Fiction (Seoul, 2010), Norwegian Woods (Norway, 2008) and A Short Story about Remembering and Forgetting (Taiwan, 2007).
Speakers:Artist Jun Yang and art critic Professor Jianhong Huang
Date: Saturday, October 29, 2011 2:00 to 4:30 p.m.
Location: Taishin Tower, 2nd Floor
