We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jieun Cheon a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Jieun, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
I have been doing art since when I was a middle school student. Originally, I was heavily influenced by Japanese anime like Studio Ghibli’s works, and I wanted to be an animator. My parents respected the things I wanted to do and supported me to apply for an art high school in Korea. However, after getting into the art high school, teachers taught me about the contemporary art which was very new for me at that time. Also, they asked my classmates and I to try different ways of artmaking from the academic drawing and watercolor painting. Through my education, I realized that there were some indescribable experiences in my life, and I could enjoy creating artworks by reinterpreting these experiences. Also, I felt that I have more talent on making fine artwork than creating animation. Therefore, I decided to be an artist and major in sculpture because I can deal with more diverse materials and formats in the sculpture department.
After I finished my BFA and MFA course from Seoul National University in Korea, I felt that I could not get more new experiences in Korea anymore, so I decided to be in a drastically different and more diverse environment. Therefore, I prepared to study abroad and started my MFA program at School of Visual Arts in New York City. Fortunately, the courses at SVA are helpful to me, and I am able to meet a lot of good peers who have similar values and thoughts in art. I have one more year before finishing my MFA program and will have my thesis show on next April. I hope to get more opportunities as an artist in this country.
Jieun, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on installation art, integrating drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture. My work is about the process of asceticism, the obsessive and repetitive self-control practices that paradoxically originates from inner conflicts and results in inner stability. My intangible experiences, disturbs me, because it stems from complex inner hatred, and it is hard to control. I choose to face it with my own visual language and convert the experiences into the fictional narrative titled Uncanished Workld.
World-building is one of my main methodologies as well as the most exciting and accomplishing aspect of my works. I create a fictional world between consciousness and subconsciousness, designated Uncanished Workld, a portmanteau of ‘uncanny world’ and ‘unfinished work.’ This world is represented through literary format, with each drawing or sculpture serving as a word or sentence in the story.
Before building each story of Uncanished Workld, I usually collect the materials from objects and places which remind me of those experiences and feel the paradoxical sensibility comes from incompatible factors. These materials mostly are inanimate beings, but somehow, they feel alive to me. For example, beef, which is from slaughtered animal, its muscle tissues still seemingly pulsing, gives me the uncanny and paradoxical sensibility. As the other example, Green Wood Cemetery is the place where those paradoxical experiences echoed within me. That place is for dead people, but also the cemetery is built as a park, so people can enjoy working out or picnic at there. The cemetery is basically from a Catholic tradition, but as the time passes by, there are also many graves based on other religions and cultures. Those incompatible factors give me sense of unintelligibility and chaos.
I mindfully collect these experiences, and then choose from them when I start a new work. By using those materials, I set the concepts of each project my work such as character design of the story and environment settings. And then I make my own tool and create the visual forms that can show self-control practices. At the same time, I look up the information from other field as needed to further develop concepts of the work.
After I complete the work in its physical forms and visual effects, I leave the concept of the work unfinished to leave some possibilities for the next work, as Uncanished Workld should be never ending story. Therefore, conceptually, all my work series are not finished, and there will be subsequent versions of each work series.
Through these processes, there are a lot of challenges I face, and the biggest challenge for me is organizing and summarizing my artwork concepts in words. As I explain my works above, I intend my works and concepts to be super complicated, but the complexity causes my struggle to explain the concepts behind my works. Therefore, I try to categorize layers of culture and theoretical references in my works, summarize them in the overall themes of my works, and connect them to my specific experiences. Honestly, I am still dealing with this challenge, and I try to get alternative perspectives from my peers whenever I can present my work.
I hope that after I solve that problem and have more work series which will give my viewers a better sense of my concepts, my viewers can indirectly experience the process of asceticism, the obsessive and repetitive self-control practices in my work. Actually, there are already some people who can feel my intensive labors as asceticism, and at the same time, they can find the correlation between references and my visual expressions. Whenever I meet those viewers, I feel proud and relieved because that means my pieces works well as I intended. As my career continues, I will keep devoting myself to developing my artwork and achieving my goals as an artist.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
For non-creatives, I think that it is hard to sympathize the mechanism between artists’ visual expressions and their thinking. People who are not artists are used to expressing their thoughts in words, so they sometimes get help from artist statement or articles about the artists.
However, in my case, when I use the professional terms from the references of other fields, there are some difficulties for my viewers to understand my concepts even though I provide the information of my work. For example, in the most recent work series titled Origami Hermit Crab, I refer to the fractal theory as my main work concept to create the visual form which has incompatible factors. I want to make specific patterns and structures which chaos and order coexist, and the fractal theory is the most appropriate reference because the theory is about finding the order from chaotic structures of nature beings such as plants or animals. I try to make pattern which goes from order to chaos, opposite to the original fractal theory. Therefore, I title one of work pieces The Ant-Fractal Map. Additionally, a hermit crab shell is one of the most typical examples of fractal structures, so using the word ‘fractal’ could serve as a clue for my viewers to understand the whole concept of Origami Hermit Crab work series.
However, for the people who do not know about the concept of fractal structures, it was difficult to understand my work at the first stage. Therefore, I keep thinking about how to transit those professional words into plain words, and how to present those references in effective way.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I would say, one thing that makes artists desperate is the situation where the artists feel there is no one who can sympathize and understand their artworks and thoughts. It is hard to have objective perspective on one’s work and thoughts on art. Moreover, fine art world is very relative and subjective, so it is also difficult for the artists to preserve their core thought and faith and dig deeper into motivations within themselves. If there are people who can understand the artists’ work and thoughts, it would be a great support. I always struggle with those difficulties, but thanks to some of my professor and peers, things are much better than they were several years ago. My professor in college, Yongdeok Lee is the person who helped me overcome my challenges.
There was a time in college when I was uncertain about the core theme and motivation behind my works. It caused troubles whenever I presented my works and attempted to communicate my thoughts with other peers or professors. I tried to ask for advice and help, but it was impossible for others to know the motif behind my works if I myself did not know it. Deep down, I knew there was a specific motivation for my creative practice which came from my personal experiences. However, it was hard to describe that motivation in words, and also it was not comfortable, if not painful, for me to talk about those personal experiences. There were several occasions where I attempted to tell my professors or classmates about these personal experiences during meetings or casual conversations, but none of them took it seriously and some of them even ridiculed it even when I revealed only a tiny part of those experiences. So, especially during junior and senior years, I became afraid of even bringing up these topics and almost lost hope for persisting in making art. All these situations made me depressed and alienated.
However, when I was working on my BFA thesis project, Professor Yongdeok Lee looked carefully at my works and was the first one who grasped my intention and understood my work deeply. Thanks to him, I was motivated again. During MFA, I found the courage to tell my personal experiences in a meeting with him. In that meeting, he listened carefully and thanked me for finally telling the true story. He identified my deepest motivation from my unorganized stories, and he helped me not only get rid of my fears and anxieties, but also regain confidence to keep creating works. Until now, he is still one of my firmest supporters, and sends messages of support and advice constantly.
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