GEUMHYUNG JEONG

In her past work, Jeong has animated self-constructed remote-controlled robots using mechanical and tech hardware tools and spare mannequin parts and medical dummies. With this new exhibition in the ICA’s lower galleries, Jeong expands her ongoing project, Under Construction, incorporating complete human skeleton models as a central component of the work.

Jeong constructs, cares for, and communicates with these homemade robot partners through an intimate dialogue of gestures and choreographed movements, evidenced in in-person performances and video installation. Under Construction will explore the link between humans and machines through autonomous sculptures, in-process constructions, and videos that both document actions between Jeong and the skeleton-machines, and the artist’s tender creation and maintenance of the work. These videos unfold the life of these forms, documenting the halting trial and error of Jeong’s developing constructions. As in the performances, the sculptures in the videos – more co-performers than objects – act in a clumsy, unreliable and human-like manner, soliciting an ambiguous empathy from the viewer.

Jeong’s installation offers a proposal for the active life of sculpture in a public institution. The artist will perform in-person with her figural machines multiple times during the run of the exhibition (dates to be announced shortly), reimagining and shifting the installation. Jeong’s work shares a valuable history with performative and interactive sculpture since the 1960s, while being firmly rooted in the present and a specific context of technology in late-stage capitalism, which the artist approaches from the perspective afforded by an adolescence spent in Seoul during the steep rise in consumerism in South Korea. This tender yet uncomfortable work represents a nuanced investigation of global techno-capitalism, addressing human relationships with our technological counterparts through care and mutual exchange. Jeong addresses this fundamental component of our appended human society in a way only sculpture can – by addressing the physical relationships in space that underline our connection to objects as active agents.

Geumhyung Jeong (b. 1980 in Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. Jeong has participated in performing arts festivals internationally and her solo exhibitions in international contemporary art institutions include: Upgrade in Progress, FMAV Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Modena (2020); Homemade RC Toy, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2019); Private Collection: Unperformed Objects, Delfina Foundation, London (2017); Tate Live: Geumhyung Jeong, Tate Modern, London (2017);Private Collection, Atelier Hermès, Seoul (2016).