YUJIN CHUNG

Lightning and thunder echo the fundamentals of cinema. The rearrangement of image and sound creates a phantasmic reality. The projection of light alongside the detached acoustic pounding of the phenomenon creates a curious ‘asynchronism’. Cinema, too, arrives as a strike: a collision of stimuli that engulfs one’s attention. How striking is that first cinematic experience? You step into a different world, surrounded by a “new sense.” The lights dim and perceptions shift. A new reality emerges.

The exhibition observes cinematic creation as an experience that operates in these junctions of perception. Yujin Chung’s work constructs a space that evokes cinema in how it manifests a reality that is reminiscent of the world, yet catches you by surprise with sensual anomalies. The artist explores dream-like apparitions, performing and flickering across varying media and materialities, blurring boundaries between documentation and fiction. Reactive lights and props in the shape of lightning (Shide 紙垂) mediate the viewers into this new world. Paintings and casts surround us as corporeal fragments of a film that never existed. A medley lures us into a hazy state, drifting through dreams, then back to an awakening.

What appears tangible may dissolve, and that which seems imagined leaves a physical trace. Yujin Chung brings this enactment of cinema as lightning and thunder, the site where perception sparks and unfolds in a way that is intangible yet deeply embodied.

After experiencing the unfamiliar convergence of sound and image, we are left with an aftershock; a memory is formed in the reverberation. Another sensitivity awakens, and we leave the theater carrying with us a phantom sensation that perks up every now and then, reminding us of this audiovisual storm. Then, like a child counting between lightning and thunder, we learn to remain inside the storm. And as we inhabit the ‘in-between’, we dream.

Rumble of the image, Hayon Chung