Under Construction, a solo exhibition by Geumhyung Jeong (b. 1980, Seoul) features a newly commissioned installation of sculpture and video, and series of live performances. Working from her background in choreography and a studied interest in the role of objects and technology in our lives, Jeong uses her body and animatronic figures built from DIY parts to parse the uncanny relationships between people and machines.
In her past work, Jeong has animated self-constructed remote-controlled robots using mechanical and tech hardware tools and spare mannequin parts and medical dummies. With this new exhibition in the ICA’s lower galleries, Jeong expands her ongoing project, Under Construction, incorporating complete human skeleton models as a central component of the work.
Jeong constructs, cares for, and communicates with these homemade robot partners through an intimate dialogue of gestures and choreographed movements, evidenced in in-person performances and video installation. Under Construction will explore the link between humans and machines through autonomous sculptures, in-process constructions, and videos that both document actions between Jeong and the skeleton-machines, and the artist’s tender creation and maintenance of the work. The sculptures – more co-performer than object – act in a clumsy, unreliable and human-like manner, soliciting an ambiguous empathy from the viewer.
Jeong’s installation offers a proposal for the active life of sculpture in a public institution. The artist will perform in-person with her figural machines (dates to be announced soon), reimagining and shifting the installation. Jeong’s work shares a valuable history with kinetic and interactive sculpture since the 1960s, while being firmly rooted in the present and a specific context of technology in late-stage capitalism, which the artist approaches from the perspective afforded by an adolescence spent in Seoul during the steep rise in consumerism in South Korea.
This tender yet uncomfortable work represents a nuanced investigation of global techno-capitalism, addressing human relationships with our technological counterparts through care and mutual exchange. Jeong addresses this fundamental component of human society in a way only sculpture can – by addressing the physical relationships in space that underline our connection to objects as active agents.
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