JANG Daeun has been attentive to the origins of form and action that exceed the discipline of linear time. In her work, the gestures of revisiting the past from a macro perspective—documentation, preservation, restoration, historicization—are overlaid with, and activated by, more micro and personal acts of recalling past time—memory and reminiscence—producing a simultaneous sense of intimacy and estrangement. For her, to remember a subject or to revisit the past is to mediate the gap between what has disappeared and what has not yet arrived. In that interval, form does not remain a completed monument, but persists as a present trace that is constantly fading and coming into being. In her early work, for instance, she posits an anonymous figure named “P” and, as if following the shadow of this person, takes multiple casts in relief and arranges them sequentially through space.1) The first imprint and the forms derived from it slip, reflect, and intersect within the grammar of presence, record, and translation, temporarily reconnecting dispersed sensations and memories. In howling (2023, RAINBOWCUBE, Seoul), JANG attempts to build a body by using her own shadow as stepping stones. Passing through Pliny’s Natural History, she calls forth a figure that is now absent.2) This attempt to fold the past onto the present—like gathering those traces that persist in the body beyond the register of memory and return to us sensorially—unfolds as she follows her shadow in real time, moving her hand to draw and to sculpt. Yet these bodily motions never succeed in fixing the shadow; in the end, only lines of tremor remain, briefly laid across the exhibition space. The drawings, sculptures, and performative elements she lays out momentarily respond to one another and then fall apart again, opening routes of perception that circle around the subject rather than describing it frontally. The structure in which discontinuous components are relationally positioned to form a sensory order resembles a constellational arrangement. Objects that were drifting freely in space complete only a provisional configuration of sensations, depending on the viewer’s gaze and movement. The structure is broken down into fragments, and from the partial, a new order is formed once again.

“Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home.
Speak and bear witness.
More than ever the Things that we might experience are vanishing,
for what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.”

• Rainer Maria Rilke 3)

Rainer Maria Rilke acknowledges human finitude—death, time, disappearance—yet layers absence and memory to construct a stratified temporality. For him, to speak of what cannot be grasped and to call things by name so that they may dwell in the world is not an act of mourning; it is, rather, an affirmation of absence as another modality of being. Resisting the empty stretches of time and wishing to hold a subject close, if only for a moment, by tracing its shadow, JANG Daeun has likewise treated the image—both in her earlier works and in this exhibition CHORUS (2025, Primary Practice, Seoul)—as a paradox in which life and death are folded together, and as a mode of being in its own right. As is well known, the image freezes the flow of life by representing and capturing the subject. To borrow Roland Barthes’s phrase, it asserts a “that-has-been (ça-a-été)”: it rescues the moment, but at the same time renders it static. To inscribe something as an image is to interrupt the continuity of time; it is to arrest the movement of being-alive. In that sense, the image stands in for the subject, yet also testifies to that subject’s absence. Representation is another name for lack, and the preservation of the image is an ritualized form of death.

JANG, however, overlays such images onto narrative structures or onto formats that stand in for the body, and by deploying a syntax that animates the exhibition’s space-time, she defers death within temporal fissures and, further, grants the image a renewed life. Her work may begin from methods of documentation or representation that deputize for an absent presence, but the fixed image simultaneously works as a trigger—an agent of recall—that lets us experience a different temporal register in the present. The seal or stamp, for example, is an image that substitutes for a person or a body and adds symbolic authority. It does not preserve the real; it is an outer shell that replaces what has already vanished. It is a modality of absence, the closure of an act, a finishing gesture that seals a trace of existence onto the surface. In □ (2025), derived from the form of the seal, the artist places these residues of the real throughout the space. Their reiterated disappearance exposes absence as a form of persistence. Once severed from its source and private history, the image may briefly dock at a semantic sign, only to depart again and link up with adjacent images, becoming a node in an imagined stage that generates spatial rhythm. At the same time, the folktale of the seven brothers—transmitted across periods, regions, and cultures—is engraved onto pillars, plaques, or horizontal wooden bars placed in the space, with numbers or letters at both ends indicating the order of the siblings, so that they overlap and lean against one another.4) On the surface such tales speak of overcoming through cooperation and solidarity; in fact, they function as moral ideology, pulling fragmented subjects back into the family/community as a whole, privileging collective unity over individual difference. In that configuration, each brother is separated into a device with a clearly defined narrative function, but in the end they are designed to converge again into one. The number “7,” which marks the last brother, promises the completion of the story. In Chorus_score (2025), the artist erases this “7,” neatly undoing that closure. Once the image is shifted toward an open-ended, generative narrative, it interlocks with Red Line (2025) and Red Dot (2025), extending into a more dynamic flow of the gaze and, on the spatial level, turning into a narrative armature that proposes more three-dimensional routes. As fixed meanings and orders unravel, the scattered shards of narrative—like stars—acquire multiple, layered temporalities according to how they are relationally positioned. The figures that now occupy time-and-space under JANG’s hand, yet have lost their origin, are less legible signs than sensory units of absence and indeterminacy. Because these forms are not subordinated to a single story or original, meaning emerges instead from the felt qualities of form and matter that trail the disappeared, from the spatial placement that directs the viewer’s looking and bodily movement. A gaze that has lost its focal point comes to perceive, all the more vividly, the animated lack between form and image.

Memory and history can never reproduce past events as they were. They are always contested and reconfigured from the vantage point of the present, and through that process time loses its linear order and becomes splintered. The artist reorders these broken remnants, provisionally suturing absence and rupture “here and now.” This act is less a technique of representation than a gesture of calling the scattered fragments of events into the present. It is not a restoration of an original, but the production of a new order of sensation and awareness along the blank left by absence. Thus JANG Daeun’s practice is not an attempt to restore or replicate past narratives and images in the present, but an effort to construct relations that can still reach the present through the ruptures of time. In this way, the individual voices gather into a single affect—into a poetic, choral image.

1. In her work P’s Shadow of Shadow of Shadow (2023), presented in the 2024 graduation exhibition at the Korea National University of Arts, the artist arranged a series of chained reliefs in the space, naming them “proliferating facial shadows.”

2. According to Pliny’s Natural History, the daughter of the potter Butades cast the shadow of her beloved’s face onto a wall and traced its outline, and her father then applied clay over it to create a relief.

3. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien.

4. In Seventh Child (2025), Seven Children (2025), and Chorus (2025), the surfaces of the wooden objects bear engraved numbers indicating the birth order of the siblings.

Credit

Participating artist : JANG Daeun
Curated by KIM Sung Woo
Text by KIM Sung Woo

Performer : JANG Hyoeun
Assistant : KIM Byeongseok

Space construction : Mujindongsa
Photo : CJY ART STUDIO (CHO Junyong)

Supported by Seoul City, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture