Jung Yeondoo: One Hundred Years of Travels

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA; Acting Director Park Jongdal), presents MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2023, Jung Yeondoo: One Hundred Years of Travels at MMCA Seoul from September 6, 2023, to February 25, 2024.

Since 1998, artist Jung Yeondoo (b. 1969) has engaged the attention of both domestic and international art communities with his photographs, videos, and installations that are staged and performance-based. Adopting historical incidents and the stories of ordinary people as his subject matter, his works have raised questions about the paradoxical relationship between memories and representation, reality and imagery, and expansive narratives and individuals’. Since 2014, he has been showing an interest in documentary narratives and the inherent personal stories within them.

The narrative that Jung Yeondoo focuses on in MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2023, Jung Yeondoo: One Hundred Years of Travels is that of the Korean diaspora to Mexico in the early 20th century. The “one hundred years of travels” in the title is a reference to the Korean migration that occurred over a century ago in 1905, when Koreans boarded the British merchant vessel SS Ilford at Incheon’s Jemulpo Harbor and traveled to Mérida, the capital city of the Mexican state of Yucatán. Jung’s interest in his century-old migration history originated with the mythology surrounding the travels of a particular plant: the prickly pear cactus. During a nine-month stay in Jeju Island to take part in a residency in 2022, the artist visited a colony of naturally growing prickly pears around Wollyeong, a village to the northwest of Jeju City. Hearing the story of the cactus’s journey and how its seeds had reportedly been carried over the Pacific Ocean from Mexico by the Kuroshio Current to set down roots on Jeju, Jung had the idea of focusing on the topic of a hundred years of travels by plants and people between Korea and Mexico. Here, a connection is drawn between the “transplantation” of the prickly pear cactus and the diaspora of Koreans uprooted to a different time and place. And, it becomes a channel opening up a third story beyond the existing migration narrative associated with imperialism, colonialism, labor, and history.

A total of five works by the artist are presented at MMCA Seoul’s Seoul Box and Gallery 5: four new artworks (One Hundred Years of Travels, Imaginary Song, Generational Portraits, and Wall of Blades) along with the 2022 work One Hundred Years of Travels—Prologue. This exhibition approaches the theme of “relocation and foreignness” as a realm of possibility that connects seemingly unrelated beings transcending time and space. It also attempts to focus on the life experiences and voices of immigrants in a context of hybridity and diverse, intermingled cultures, using art to help viewers relate to unfamiliar people and things. Furthermore, the exhibition invites the viewer to think about the experience of temporal and special dislocation, the relationship between difference and familiarity, the cultural and historical generation gaps associated with migration, and the individuals who are translated across boundaries, beyond the documentary narrative of Korean migration in the early 20th century.

To approach the moments, experiences, and memories of early 20th-century immigrants as closely as possible, the artist paid three visits to Yucatán over a two-year period beginning in 2022, interviewing second-to fifth-generation descendants of Korean immigrants and taking photographs of various tropical plants at the state’s henequen farms, which were a crucial factor in bringing Koreans to Mexico. If the artist’s performative research approach of visiting actual historical locations represents a relational channel for extracting internal aspects of the Mexican diaspora narrative, his use of multiple media—most prominently including artistic staging, along with still photographs, videos, texts and sounds, performances, and installations—is a visual mechanism for bringing to the surface the hybridity contexts and the various ironies and contradictions concealed behind the fixed narrative of “diaspora history.” With their various mixtures (narrative/text/performance, performance/video), the artworks assume a pluralistic, complex quality that summons forth the migration narratives and sensations of movement in a more allegorical and layered way.

The first large-scale exhibition of Jung Yeondoo’s work at MMCA in 15 years, this event illustrates the transformations in his oeuvre over that time. It will also be an opportunity to encourage greater connections with diasporas, migrations, and movements that have become universal experiences in contemporary times.