Jeong Jeongju’s art opens onto an extraordinary realm of illusion-shifting between the conceptual play of light as “abstract illusion” and the “figurative representation” in which surveillance cameras capture the interiors and exteriors of architectural models, projecting their real-time footage across museum walls. Equally striking is the sublime that arises when actual space-the architectural model-and represented space-the projected image-intersect and encroach upon one another, unsettling perception through their collision. Jeong Jeongju pushes this further by orchestrating a near-magical “apparatus of the gaze,” one that captures and reflects the audience back onto themselves, transforming the viewer into the viewed. This sculptural apparatus compels the viewer to oscillate endlessly between the thresholds of unreality and reality, abstraction and figuration, space and subject-initiating a continual meditation on the landscape of reality and the very question of human subjectivity.
**Excerpt from A World of Illusion Mediated by Light: Jeong Jeongju (p. 10)

The prone and crouched body, refusing external command and abstaining from competition, rejects the ingrained imperative of the “upright body” imposed by power and institution. It is in this very mode of refusal that the authentic political force of Bae Hyungkyung’s sculpture resides. Standing before these works, the viewer is no longer a safe or detached observer. Moving among the figures, one becomes newly aware of the posture one’s own body inhabits. In that moment, the sculpture acts as a mirror of existence - stirring, unsettling, and awakening the viewer’s unconscious habits of being.
**Excerpt from Forms That Sustain the Burden of Existence: Bae Hyungkyung (p. 50)

“Facing the death of a family member, I found myself absorbed in the difficult problem of how to give visual form to absence - to “not-being.” The empty spaces in my photographs and installations, the worn clothing, the traveling bags - these objects are never simply voids of nothingness. On the contrary, they stand as the strongest possible “marker of presence,” proof that someone truly, fiercely lived through that space of a life, and that they genuinely existed, as trace and memory, within the layered strata of accumulated time.”
**Excerpt from an interview Im Suniy, Confronting Anxiety Head-On (p. 122)

To strip the doll’s face from his sculpture and reach toward the real that lies beyond it, Shin Jonghun borrows fire, allowing it to erase what representation has imposed. As the layers of paper built up across the figure’s surface are set alight and consumed, what remains -scattered in traces throughout the sculpture - is something of the presence the sculptor had only dimly sensed in the model. Yet with every fracture, gouge, and loss wrought by fire, the sculpture moves further away from the model. And as the model’s presence withdraws from the work, the sculpture increasingly becomes itself - emerging, at last, as a work in its own right.
**Excerpt from Sculpture That Reaches the Real: Shin Jonghun (p. 203)