PRESS & PUBLICATION
Suboart Magazine
July Issue, 2023
Interview, Physical Publication
Al-Tiba 9 Contemporary Art
June 26, 2023
Interview with SuJung Jo
Suboart Magazine
May 8, 2023
Rising Stars: SuJung Jo
Koreatimes
March 1, 2023
New York K-Art Festival
La Pera Project
October, 2022
Online Exhibition
Hyperallergic
April 27, 2022
”Art’s Conventional Signifiers Are No Longer Useful”
by Julia Curl
Hyperallergic
April 18, 2022
”Pratt’s 2022 Fine Arts and Photography MFA Exhibition is on View in Brooklyn”
by Julia Curl
REVIEW
THE FOLDS AND CLOAKS OF SUJUNG JO
by Ekin Erkan
SuJung Jo is an artist of the fold, which mean she is also inherently an artist of light and its mending. By way of the bridge that is metaphor, it also means that she is an artist of the body—with shadows, balance, and the dimming of corners, she curves her media into corporeality. Given her background in photography, this is of course all rather fitting. Such are the affordance of her manipulating layered organza, which she bends and crimps into careening, billowing bulbous clouds, hanging like the wings of a bat. Her works not only belies photography's historical pardox: the imprisonment to the depicted three-dimensional elements upon two-dimensional recesses, but prod photography into the heaving, breathing vantage of the living and gasping. These works not only become dimensional objects but dynamic and galvanized.
Throughout the series, this motif of the bodily is underscored by the actual printed images—the representeds. In one piece, Untitled 4, an anonymous, black-haired woman turns away from us, much like Gerhard Richter’s Betty (1988). She is also reminiscent of Renoir's bathers, though the dance of the interior scene and its elements (walls, a lamp, flowers) suggest that we may be inside a bedroom. That which is depicted appears to include curtains, their dramatic weaving and umbral obscuring ever-heightened—doubled, in fact—by the enveloped swooping bend that SuJung has arranged. There are a few doubling effects, in fact, precisely due to how SuJung plays with light, making a model out of it. Woman’s hair is outlined by a gray, ghostly series of translucent wisps, the whole interior room and the nude body cascading into one formal series of ripples. Such formalist play also abounds in Exposure, here recollecting the trans-medial games of Thomas Demand, as the sun-soaked building structure is brought to a whimpering flutter.
In another, similar piece, Untitled 3, we see the woman holding a utensil—perhaps a paintbrush—against a canvas. Or is it a window? There are enough anonymization effects throughout the exhibition that such moves feel intentional, flaxen rays flooding in so as to bleed over the recognizable elements that would tell us where, exactly, we are. This act of making-alien is done so sensitively that we do not mind it at all. Instead, we welcome it. Only the form of the human arm and threads of dangling hair can be clearly made out. In another, amber-russet-swept piece, Untitled 2, we see Woman (this time, more lucidly) as she exhales; the smoke, hoary white, billows like vapor out of her nostrils. We get the sense that we are watching the daily rituals of a stranger, but perhaps this is an autobiographical act for the artist.
Similarly, in a particularly affecting, floating piece, Sleeper 2, we see the eponymous man at rest; his head is buoyed by a pillow. Again, SuJung conducts a doubling act where, once again, it is in the form of the organza medium that directs it. But this time, it is also achieved through her use of borders, which gives us what appears to be a hovering cloud.
Daydream, the most minimalist of the pieces, would almost be field painting were it not for the lower-middle element that suggests we might be privy to an adumbral, veiled scene. The chestnut-brown upper-right corner finds spotlights of tawny-bisque-yellow creep in, shaded hints in the lower field unspooling more questions than answers. Are these concealed fingers, masked and shrouded by a blanket? Or is what we can barely see the shadow of a soaring bird at dusk? Querying is more satisfying that having our queries answered.
SuJung’s series is redolent of the great queer abstractionist, Linda Besemer. Just as Besemer takes the materialization of color further through the use of optical illusion and surface patterns, prodding forward the Op Art paintings of Bridget Riley to novel expanses, so too does SuJung undermine modernist efforts to detach the surface of a medium from illusion. Illusion and surface collapse into one in these quiet, moody-broody studies. These pieces produce an illusory sense of movement in space, they threaten to shake away the manacles of solidity, deploying illusion like a liquid. SuJung’s organza are like gauze tapestries run through by light. They give us the playful force of encounter between the folds that she so poetically services into lapping waves that never quite break against a shore. These are still, frozen waves—a silk-spun series of riddles. Flaming crimsons become spectral lingering impressions as coral and pink equivocate. There is a pleasant melancholy that is omnipresent, like that of Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo’s cinema. Light is manipulated to simultaneously exist visibly and materially, it howls and vibrates. The folding and unfolding, the dragging and drifting, of SuJung’s pieces draws us into that minimalist genre of intimisme so cultivated by artists like Balthus, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Carl Holsøe. These are pieces that shimmer of memories, that feel like our own lost narratives. They are utterly familiar.