Artist: Jihye Jung
Exhibition title: Pense et bête (Beasty notes)
Venue: Les Bains-Douches, Alençon, France
Date: March 14 – April 7, 2024
Photography: Georgina Corcy / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Les Bains-Douches, Alençon
Procrastinating Fast
There’s reason to doubt, isn’t it? These objects that surround us, with which we live. With people, it’s word against word. And their gestures. What are they thinking? Are they okay? Or strangers, even to themselves? And the animals?
Jihye Jung lives in a world of questions. Serious questions about serious things. About the world. And also about other kinds of questions, both very personal, common, and shared. Delicately trivial, or intimate, very intimate. The big questions and the small ones are the subject of the same gaze, the same doubt, somewhere one might believe between ingenuousness and naivety. This gaze, Jihye makes it the material of her daily practice. In her painting, through writing, in photographing. Over the course of her young career, she gives herself this freedom of languages, yet —as the exhibition “Pense et bête” shows — with a predilection for painting, for the canvas. But regardless of the medium, there is an obvious unity of spirit in the artist’s proposals: that of a relationship to the world filled with small joys and great anxieties, with futillity and gravity, all held at a good distance by a tone that is uniquely hers. The artist doesn’t shy away from recognizing herself in humor, but that’s too little to say. Perhaps there’s a Korean word for that? (“To be verified,” the artist would say). The English —who are said to know about humor— have this expression: tongue in cheek. To speak through understatement (the English again); through litotes: saying less to imply more. But no, that’s not quite it yet. No calculation or trick of thought: the proposition is direct, trivial, even crude if it must be. All depth is on the surface. Like this painting with little material, often in oil, but dense with the density of the world, with these strong images through delicate descriptive economy. No cynicism, a hint of the grotesque, not even really derision, no. But a foolish gaze.
Foolishness, not really the one celebrated, somewhat cynical at times, the aesthetics of foolishness “à la Jean-Yves Jouannais”, who loves to overdo it. Not even Belgian derision, but closer to the one that grates with the painter Carlos Kusnir. Much rather the foolishness described by the philosopher Clément Rosset in Le Réel – Traité de l’idiotie. With his way of claiming joy as a condition beyond the resistance of reality, of choosing the white jubilation of life over the black jubilation of sad passions, rather than giving in to pathos before this bizarre, consistent and intangible substance, threatening but of which we are made. Reality exceeds: it resists. No representation can truly contain it. No translation really accounts for it. It overflows. There’s always more dishes to do. Fool, let’s understand it with Rosset, it’s the idio— of idiosyncrasy, and of idiocy. The irreducible singular, which Rosset traverses with this “major force” of an affirmed vitalism. Jihye Jung makes it a title for her thesis: Resterenvie. In one word.
So, a foolish gaze, informed by this irreducibility, but voluntary and resolute. Jihye notes it in her journal: “…No foolish, is that okay, that word?” And nonetheless practices her way of epoché — this voluntary suspension of judgment that phenomenologist philosophers claim as a method. For her, phenomenological attention begins at the heart of everyday life, material and organic. Is there really a system of objects? The things in the house and the burning planet!? And the body that manifests itself, hair, pimples, hunger, pain; and everything that comes out of the body, the smells and other materials that hygiene prefers to repress, urine and feces. How do we pee, us girls, you boys?
A foolish gaze, probing into depth; and embodied in a writing of flatness, of the ordinary. Things are there. Jihye encounters, wonders, and questions: a pâtisson? A snowy evening? An unfinished conversation? The blank canvas waiting its turn? Disturbance traverses the slightly chaotic journal that Jihye keeps: throughout the pages, it’s up to the reader to find themselves in the artist’s thoughts. Shopping list, micro story, questions: “Since when is it art?”. With a very expressive awkwardness, in speech or in writing, she delves into this thickness of language, measured by someone who speaks in a language that is not maternal. Tongue in cheek, it’s about taking the world at face value and making it a bittersweet and playful allegory, always to be remade. From painting to page, from images to share, between fable and memory, like so many vital conjurations, procrastinate, but quickly —with urgency, joy, and appetite.
-Christophe Domino
