If you ask somebody about their dreams for
their own future, don’t they always appear surprisingly linear? With
aspirations so simple, they make you want to laugh: the same but more
successful, the same but more sexy, the same but in a nicer environment. For
his slide projection BeWitched (2003/4), titled after the 1960s TV series,
Korean artist Yeondoo Jung asked people where they would like to see
themselves in the future, and staged this future in a before-and-after
photographic series. In the slide show, images of people at their often
dreary place of work slowly dissolve into a bright image of their future
dreams, full of charm. There is also an element of faux-naiveté, stemming
not so much from the relationship of the dreams to the real world, but from
the limitations that become apparent – those of the props or settings of the
idealised scenarios – that again correspond to the limitations of power in
drab day jobs. There also appear to be limitations of the imagination, which
become strikingly apparent when the employee of a car repair shop turns into
a Formula One champion. In spite of elaborate composition and detailed
props, it is the near-tangible satisfaction of witnessing the grey reality
fade into the glorious vision of yet another dream accomplished and the
tragedy of knowing it will most probably never come to be that recalls the
concept that a personal future is more complex than this one imagined
moment.
The complex relationship of the weightless beauty of dreams to the harshness
of day-to-day reality, where making-do is the prime goal, has been at the
heart of Jung’s work from the outset. This contrast made his early Grand Day
Out (1996) more than a satire of everyday life for a Korean in London – more
a magical trip to the borderland of Western and Eastern civilisation. This
is also where Jung has managed to capture some of his most amazing images:
dancers at the Borame Dance Hall (1999), who with passionate verve give
themselves over to the pleasures and poses of Western ballroom dancing, an
utterly exotic discipline in Korea.
Jung’s latest project, Wonderland (2004/5), is derived from drawings by
children and adolescents, who thoroughly explained them to him before he
then transcribed them into photographic images. What sounds surprisingly
simple is, of course, a complex explanation and reading of the images’
contents. Assisted by young people, often in their late teens, at the
beginning of their professional education or just enthusiastic amateur
craftsmen, Jung relies on his protagonists’ sensitivities, especially their
ability to fall back into early childhood, while still appearing as young
adults. Fragments of fairytales, personal dreams and wishes, along with
fantastic inventions and interpretations of their surroundings – through
Jung’s lens they are rendered in DIY-cinemascope. What they show is that
adult dreams are one thing, but those of youth have a completely different
content. Parents have no control over this, yet they are still fully
responsible for what is essentially their own creation – particularly as
representatives of a set of cultural values. Jung has no intention of
mockery, there is no sarcasm or irony involved. He arranges these images
with great care so as not to belie the trust placed in him, be it by a
school kid dreaming up fairies hovering over giant flowers, or the waiter of
a diner dreaming of becoming a chef in a first-class restaurant. Even if the
waitress of an ice-cream parlour turns into an Eskimo surrounded by sledge
dogs or a fashion model dreams of nothing but a nice house and three kids:
this world is so good you will want to be part of it, or make it a part of
yourself.
Andreas Schlaegel is a writer and artist based in Berlin