Jiyoon Chung’s practice quietly probes the tension between subtle defiance and reluctant acceptance of the social structures that shape everyday life. Born in 1990 in Seoul and currently living between South Korea and Frankfurt, the artist works across installation, sound, text, and sculpture to expose the quiet ironies embedded in contemporary conventions, often through psychological thought experiments and seemingly minor gestures.
In her latest exhibition Dead End at Politikens Forhal in Copenhagen, Chung confronts the overwhelming weight of overdetermined symbols, most notably the crucifix, by turning it into a literal container for human residue: magnified fingerprints, solvent dissolved graffiti ink, and carefully staged voids. The work blurs the line between the sacred and the profane, between invisible systems of control and moments of personal emancipation.
In this conversation, we discuss how Chung navigates exhausted symbols, the unconscious traces we leave behind, and the small but vital spaces art can still create for reflection in an era saturated with pre given meanings.
The exhibition text describes the crucifix as “a dead end to the imagination.” Can you explain what you mean by that, especially in a world where this single symbol has become so overloaded with meaning that it almost feels empty?
The excess of meaning also implies that something can be too easily worshipped, and just as easily hated. I described this condition, the suffocation and vagueness produced by symbols and the layers of ideas they inevitably attract, as a kind of “dead end to the imagination.”
I am interested in what happens when an existing symbolic language is not necessarily overturned, but instead repeated until it becomes worn out. It is less about intentionally subverting a symbol than about observing how certain forms, images, and words begin to expose their own instability through excessive repetition.
I think symbols like the cross persist precisely because they continuously absorb projections, desires, guilt, reverence, fear, and hostility and more. There is also a kind of attachment or fascination involved. I am interested in the misalignment that occurs when something supposedly eternal or sacred is continuously reproduced through fragile human language, material, and images. Sometimes that gap itself becomes emotionally excessive.
Throughout the space, everyday actions like walking through sliding doors or leaving fingerprints on the glass suddenly feel charged with meaning. How did you want to play with the idea of the sacred and the mundane coexisting in the same environment?
I don’t necessarily consider the traces we leave in everyday life, or the act of passing through automatic sliding doors, to be particularly mundane or secular. What feels important to me is that we do these actions unconsciously.
The fingerprint work Prior Aging also begins from something highly personal, but once these traces are repeated and accumulated into a mass, they no longer appear as marks of an individual body. I wanted the symbolic systems we naturally entrust ourselves to to function like interfaces that we physically pass through and come into contact with every day.
Behind the reassembled cross there is only empty space. What does that emptiness mean to you, and why was it important to leave it vacant rather than fill it with something else?
I am interested in forms of spectacle and imagination that can only be shared between the person who constructed the exhibition, myself as the artist, and those who physically experience it in the space. Through gestures related to spatial design, scale, and architectural form, I like to either amplify or weaken the emotional drive of the work and the artist behind it. This often requires mischievous interventions grounded in a sensory, physical, and intuitive understanding of the exhibition space and its composition.
In this exhibition, the sense of emptiness that arrives after monumentality was particularly important to me. The vacant space behind the reassembled cross was not meant to be filled with another image or object. Instead, I wanted that emptiness itself to remain exposed, almost like the emotional afterimage left behind once the spectacle, symbolism, or expectation has already exhausted itself.
In previous works like Condition Reserved, the sound of roller coaster screams, and Apology Gifts, ghostwritten letters of remorse, you already explored collective emotion and the performance of sincerity. Do you see Dead End as a continuation of those themes?
In Condition Reserved, I was interested in the sonic bodies of screams on roller coasters. When observing a crowd from a distance, people can appear as though they possess a clear and unified direction of will. But when looking at their faces as individuals within the crowd, individual desire begins to feel far more complicated and ultimately unknowable.
In Apology Gifts, through ghostwritten letters of remorse, I wanted to explore how sincerity can be socially performed or mechanically reproduced. Sentences that appeal to guilt emotionally or legally often become increasingly excessive and decorative precisely when they attempt to sound timely and convincing. By removing all direct descriptions of the actual crime and leaving only the apologetic language itself, I wanted to grotesquely amplify the rhetoric of goodwill until it became almost uncomfortable, while still possibly containing some emotional residue. The work was not only about false sincerity, but also about how institutional or social language edits reality through omission. The “event” disappears, while its emotional and legal surface remains intact.
I think Dead End continues these interests, particularly around erasure and repetition. However, unlike Apology Gifts, where erasure operates more deliberately and structurally, Dead End is closer to a condition in which symbols become emptied through overexposure. The cross appears repeatedly throughout the exhibition not as a stable religious image but as something that has become overdetermined and exhausted, a sign that continues to circulate even after losing a clear destination or authority. In that sense, the work deals less with intentional concealment and more with a kind of erosion produced by repetition itself, where multiple voices, references, and functions begin to collapse into one another.
Rather than presenting erasure as a single gesture of deletion, these works approach it as a slower and more ambiguous process: meaning becoming unstable through repetition, mediation, translation, and circulation. I think that ambiguity is important to me, because even when a symbol or language feels emptied out, some emotional residue still continues to linger inside it.
The curator writes that the exhibition is about both the “suffocation” of an overdetermined symbol and its possible “emancipation.” How do you personally experience this tension between feeling trapped by meaning and finding freedom within it?
I do not necessarily believe that a sense of emancipation directly leads to freedom. I think lethargy can also remain as a residual emotion of emancipation. I am more interested in how people continue to emotionally inhabit and live within unstable and ambivalent conditions such as attachment and exhaustion, belief and disillusionment.
After spending time in this space, surrounded by broken symbols, human traces, and quiet confrontation with invisible control, what do you hope visitors take away with them when they leave?
Questions about what kinds of vessels our desires and attachments become entrusted to, and through what kinds of channels or passages they continue to circulate. I do not necessarily expect viewers to arrive at a conclusion. Perhaps it is more about a subtle discomfort, or with a heightened awareness of the symbolic systems they continue to emotionally inhabit.
