Yeondoo Jung is known for his photographs, videos and installations that toy with the borders of reality and representation. His works often reveal their mechanisms of pictorial illusion, and expose the apparatuses by which still and moving images are constructed more generally. For his recent exhibition at MAAP Space, his first solo show in Australia, Jung presented two single-channel videos: Documentary Nostalgia (2007) and Twilight Seoul (2012).
Documentary Nostalgia is a silent, feature-length (84 minutes) video in which a team of stagehands constructs and deconstructs an evolving series of vignettes for a fixed and unedited camera. The sequence begins in a small domestic interior, which is based on a memory of his father’s home.1 A worker dressed in bright orange overalls enters and hangs a framed picture of a classic misty-mountain-sunset scene on one of the wallpapered walls. Other similarly dressed workers place a rug, adjust a chandelier, position a light fitting and dress the window with a cherry blossom as they tweak the composition for the all-seeing camera. Another worker, actually a magician disguised as a worker, produces a burst of flame while he puts a flower delicately in a vase. Soon, the entire room (now obviously a wobbly, wafer-thin film set on casters) is forced into a new position so that a small portion of its exterior, complete with brick veneer and signage, forms part of a new urban streetscape. The workers proceed to lay a bitumen-looking drop-sheet for a road, graffiti a roller door next to a small grocery store and position a sign for a bus stop, at which two actor-commuters subsequently stand and get rained on by watering-cans.
Jung uses such choreographed techniques to