1 March – 12 April, 2009
Sukjoon Jang was the Arts Centre’s Artist in Residence for six weeks in March and April 2009. From South Korea, she found the contrast between her native Seoul and Christchurch quite profound. She is a contemporary, visual artist and her installation around the Arts Centre site is the culmination of her residency here.
Jang’s artistic practice revolves around photography and collage. She is interested by the way work influences the development of cities and urban environments. To her, the city functions like a machine, with people working away as part of it keep to the wheels turning. Jang finds meaning in parts of the city which we do not notice, ignore or disapprove of. Her method of creating artwork draws our attention to features of our city that we may have never thought about before on a conscious level. She takes abstract fragments and arranges them en masse, aestheticising these fragments and making a work that is both beautiful and provoking.
Whilst in Christchurch, Jang was fascinated by its industrial areas and the abundance of shop fronts painted in garish, bright colours. The use of these colours, as Jang understands it, is for merchandising or marketing reasons- they strive to catch the eye of the passer-by and commit the business to memory. Or, she wonders, is it to add some colour to a part of the city which is otherwise fairly dull and aesthetically unappealing or uninteresting? To Jang, these brightly coloured businesses appear like children’s building blocks or Lego, further adding to her initial impression of Christchurch with its low, often quaint buildings and spacious layout as a ‘toy city.’ Following on from this, the SOFA Gallery window installation comprises of artwork that she has called Toyland.
For Jang, her process of taking photos and arranging them digitally, piece by piece, is similar to the way in which repeated features of the Christchurch landscape have developed. Starting with one coloured shop-front, those that have followed have appeared over time organically, without, it would seem, any deliberate intention. The collection and arrangement by Jang of these images draws out attention to this feature of our urban landscape, perhaps for the first time and asks us to consider why it is so, whilst all the while presenting us with beautiful artwork. Her artwork is a contemporary stained glass that it is in dialogue with the heritage stained glass opposite in the Clock Tower. In this way, her artwork is a seamless meeting of the old and the new.
Images: top right, Uni Circus and right, 00100.
Catalogue essay by Barbara Garrie, 2009, written for the launch of the Bus. Stop. project
Displayed in eight bus stop light boxes around the city of Christchurch, Sukjoon Jang’s digital photo-collages engage in a kind of urban social geography that suggest new ways of perceiving and navigating urban space. Jang’s photographs are the product of her own meanderings through city streets, both here in Christchurch and in her home city of Seoul. Often interested in buildings that are characteristic of particular districts, Jang compiles a photographic archive that in a sense indexes or catalogues these localities. Focusing on details such as roller doors, stairs, windows or brickwork, these images become source material for a more complex aesthetic experience of place. Photographs are cut, cropped, repeated and overlaid to create montages which, in a similar way to Cubism, collapse space and time, producing alternative ways of seeing the world.
Jang refers to her work as ‘social landscape photography’ or ‘documentary painting’, both terms that conjure a certain impulse to work outside of specific mediums and discourses. Using digital media, her approach to photography is a distinctly painterly one that manipulates colour, line and form into abstract compositions. Within this, however, there remains a commitment to capturing and recording a real sense of place.
This current installation includes two works produced during Jang’s recent residency at the Christchurch Arts Centre in March – April 2009, along with four earlier works completed in Seoul. In displaying her works at strategic stops along well-used city bus routes, Jang’s project moves from the studio back into the urban community. Viewers are presented with beautifully reconfigured images that depict those often-overlooked areas of the city landscape. The Sky (2006), for example, is composed of multiple photographs of pale blue roller doors that belong to small-scale electronics and tool workshops in Seoul. These shabby, run-down entrances are transformed by Jang into a delicate rendering of a fragment of blue sky. Christchurch’s commercial and industrial landscape is similarly transfigured in Toyland (2009). Here, the brightly coloured exteriors of supermarkets, garages and other trade premises are playfully presented as a series of stacked and interconnected children’s building blocks. We might say, then, that these images work to activate the act of seeing, drawing into sharper focus parts of our environs we might otherwise neglect. These are often areas through which the urban commuter transits rather than destinations themselves. Jang’s installation resonates particularly with those travellers who navigate the city by bus. Coming across these works at their bus stop sites, Jang’s public installation aims to prompt her audience to view the spaces they journey through in a new light.
Importantly, Jang sees the city not just in terms of physical space, but as a peopled social space. The sites she engages with are ones that have a particular relationship to lived urban experience. Jang tells of government moves to phase out the workshops we see photographed in The Sky because they act as reminders of South Korea’s past economic troubles. The pretty candy coloured shop fronts of Flower Carriage Bar (2007), which represent the ‘red light district’ brothels found on the outskirts of Seoul, belie the promiscuous activities that take place behind the closed doors. So too, the ethereal simplicity of White Wall (2007) contrasts with the assembled images of post-Korean War concrete slum housing. (White Wall shown is shown here on website and in catalogue only, it is not part of the Bus. Stop. project)
Another important aspect of Jang’s work, then, is her ongoing engagement with the history of city spaces. Her Christchurch works are no exception to this. 00100 (2009), in which images of the corners of the Arts Centre and Octagon building are spliced together, reflects on the artist’s personal experiences of living in the city but also recognizes the importance of these gothic heritage buildings to Christchurch’s identity.
The inclusion of works from both Christchurch and Seoul in this public art project is useful in allowing us to consider the patterns and cross-cultural contrasts in our urban environments and social spaces. The success of Jang’s photo-montages, and their installation within the local public transport system, lies in their ability to affect new ways of conceptualising the urban environment.
