Yeondoo Jung: Part I

Advancing Beyond Efficiency
Yeondoo Jung on how the misuse of technology leads to art.


CineMagician (2010), dual-channel HD video, 55 min. All images: Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul.

Based in Seoul, Yeondoo Jung often explores the potentialities and limitations of photographic media. For the photo series “Bewitched” (2001), he helped portrait subjects realize their dreams through elaborate staged scenarios, while for “Wonderland” (2005) he used children’s drawings as the basis for photographic compositions, underscoring the gaps in logic between children’s fantasies and the mechanics of the camera. In 2007 he completed his first film, the 85-minute-long single-take Documentary Nostalgia, using a series of sets that were assembled and deconstructed over the course of filming. These works have all developed, in a sense, from what the artist calls a “misuse of technology,” through which he employs new media in the most manual ways possible. ART IT recently met with Yeondoo Jung via an online chat service to learn more about this aspect of his practice.

ART iT: When we previously met in Tokyo we discussed the notion of “primitive technology” and how it applies to your work. I thought we could start off by talking about your recent multimedia performance CineMagician (2009), which seems to be a self-conscious reflection on the differences between live and mediated experiences and how technology affects these two modes of perception.

YJ: Before talking about CineMagician, I’d like to talk about my experience making the single-take, 85-minute-long film Documentary Nostalgia (2008). I shot the work entirely in the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul. My team and I constructed a group of sets in the museum, and the whole idea was basically that we would put the camera in one place, press the recording button and keep it running for the length of the work. Popular films and TV are generally constructed through editing. If there’s a dialogue scene, the director cuts from one person to the next and a conversation develops out of those shifts in perspective. But with Documentary Nostalgia it was almost like the earth was standing still and the rest of the universe was revolving around it. This idea of “one scene, one take” is a really primitive way of using the camera. For example, if I wanted to shoot a classroom scene from two angles, ordinarily I would simply stop the camera after completing one shot, move the camera, and then record again. But in my case, when I want to shift angles, I would have to ask everybody on set to stand up with their desks and chairs and turn sideways, and then have the crew lift up the walls of the set and rotate them in order to establish the new view.
For Documentary Nostalgia we created six different scenes: my parents’ home; the street outside my father’s pharmacy business; a rice paddy; a cow pasture; a forest; and a mountaintop. When we were making the film there was a lot of excitement because everyone knew that there was no room for error, no way to say “Cut! Stop the camera!” And of course in 85 minutes there are many possibilities for errors. The set was so tense that once we completed the shoot everyone experienced this great rush of joy and achievement. But when we showed the work in the museum, the viewers didn’t seem to share that energy. The temperatures between the creators and audience were completely different. One was hot and the other was cool, looking at the work objectively.
In retrospect I felt that this “temperature difference” between creator and audience defines the medium of video itself. I began to think about how I could share the experience of production with the audience, and this led to CineMagician, for which I brought a camera to a theater and shot a film as a performance. We set up the camera in the first row of the theater seating and then started filming the performance in front of an audience, and connected the camera to a projector so that what it was recording was appearing in a live feed on screen. The audience were watching the film at the same time they were watching the live performance, and I thought that allowed them to share some of the same tension that the production crew feels during a studio shoot.
In CineMagician the audience were also able to notice the differences between what they saw with their eyes and what the camera was able to record, and we incorporated this into the work. The camera has only one “eye,” with a strong contrast, so for example three different objects aligned together in a specific way on the stage became one tree when played back through the video projection. We also had a character in the performance dressed entirely in black from head to toe. The audience could clearly see this character but the camera was unable to “see” him, so if the shadow character picked up a bag, in the live feed that bag appeared to be floating in space.







All: Still from Documentary Nostalgia (2007), video, 85 min.

ART iT: So with Documentary Nostalgia were you trying to explore the potential of technology by using it in the simplest way possible?

YJ: When I first suggested the idea for the film to the camera director, who is a commercial cinematographer, he told me that even great movie directors struggle to complete a 15-minute-long take, and wanted to know why an artist who had never made any video work thought he could pull off an 85-minute-long take. I responded that I didn’t know any better and just wanted to do it. Of course, in terms of technology there are many easier ways to achieve the same effect. Commercial films are all about the scale of production and teamwork, and finding the most economic ways to solve creative problems. They never go the long way around; they can easily stop the camera and connect things later through editing.
On the other hand, without stopping the camera you invite many difficulties. A long take has to be seamless, so my work also entails showing things that normally would not be acceptable in a movie. For example, the scene with the forest looks almost like a still photograph, even though time is running and you can see some slight movements. Then the next moment the lights switch on, crew members enter the shot to take out the trees and as they head back off stage you can see the Styrofoam board holding everything together and it’s a complete breakdown of the fantasy. Then we complete the next scene with the mountaintop and it repeats all over again. So at different intervals I conceptually broke the fantasy that the movie creates, and that’s the effect I was aiming for.
A counter example is something like the Avatar movie, which is a complete fantasy created in 3D, and makes you wonder, how much more real is actually real? Most of the technology that I use actually dates to the analog era of the MGM-style spectacle, whereas most of the audience now are born and raised with computers and are completely habituated to fast-paced editing. I heard that TV producers have a rule of not showing one angle for more than two seconds because otherwise people will change the channel. So asking an audience to stay in place for 85 minutes with no sound is almost an act of torture. When I showed Documentary Nostalgia at the Museum of Modern Art cinema, I thought it really tested the patience of these New Yorkers, but it actually seemed to work. With biennials and other large-scale exhibitions with dozens of artists you often see visitors open up the curtains to the video rooms, watch for 10 seconds and then when nothing happens close the curtains and move on to the next artwork. But in the case of a work with no overwhelming sound or movement or narrative aspect, once you pass a certain degree of non-action, once you pass that initial boredom, what I call “second boredom” occurs where the experience of the work takes on its own life. Viewers start thinking things like, “why the hell is the guy shooting this way?” And if you’re watching in a movie theater then this kind of overwhelming experience actually allows viewers to think deeper thoughts, perhaps about their childhood, or other associative thoughts that may or may not be connected to the imagery. I find this an ideal way, actually, to pass on my ideas.


CineMagician (2010), dual-channel HD video, 55 min.

ART iT: Technological developments – even those that gave life to a movie like Avatar – are often oriented towards economy, making things as fast and as cheap and as smooth as possible, rather than necessarily creating new visions of the world.

YJ: I have this belief that when you say, for example, someone is a professional with Photoshop, it means that person is able to quickly achieve a minimum level of quality to satisfy a maximum number of people. So being “professional” is about creating high turnover at a minimum standard. I never work with Photoshop myself, but as an artist I might buy Photoshop for Dummies and start reading about a specific, simple effect that I want to create, like researching how to shift an image of people on the subway in Seoul to a scene of the London Tube. I learn how to collage the people, how to select them, how to make the combined images smoother. I don’t have to know everything, I only need to know how to make the shadow perfect so that the person from Seoul actually seems to be in the Tube. That allows me in fact to be more accurate. I might zoom up to 500 percent to work pixel by pixel, or spend two-to-three months creating a single image, whereas a professional might spend only two hours, or 20 minutes even, working on a similar image.
What it means is that the efficient way is not necessarily the best or only way. I’m not a professional. I’m not a movie director who can produce a 15-minute-long take, but that doesn’t stop me, as an artist, from dealing with media that I’ve never explored. The technology is there for everybody to use but artists are able to get to the core of the medium itself because they are willing to investigate the most inefficient methods of using the medium. An artist can make a direct comment on the medium itself because nobody else is willing or interested to do it.


Part II. Retrograde Parlor Tricks
Yeondoo Jung on the illusory limitations of digital effects.

Copyrighted Image