“An attitude toward life to which one aspires is the foundation of the work.” ― Sook Jin Jo, artist’s note, 1986.
Sook Jin Jo: That’s How the Light Gets In is the second exhibition in Nam-Seoul Museum of Art’s “Leading Korean Sculptors” series. It surveys an attitude toward artistic practice and reflections on existence of Sook Jin Jo, who, for more than four decades, has worked primarily in New York across a wide range of forms, including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, performance, public projects, and architecture. Born in Gwangju, Jeollanam-do, in 1960, Sook Jin Jo entered the Graduate School of Fine Arts, Hongik University, in 1982. Moving beyond prescribed media conventions, she began her practice in the early 1980s by actively experimenting with unconventional materials such as plywood, floor covering, and cardboard. Beginning with The 10th Independants in 1983, followed by her first solo exhibition Over There at Kwan-Hoon Gallery and Frontier Festival in 1985, and The 11th Ecole de Seoul in 1986, the artist remained closely engaged with the contemporary Korean art scene. After moving to New York in 1988, she continued to build an international career, gaining critical and institutional recognition in the New York art world, allowing her to move beyond being framed solely as an Asian artist.
The exhibition title That’s How the Light Gets In encapsulates the ontological insight that runs throughout Sook Jin Jo’s practice. Within linear time, we are all beings who eventually pass through. For the artist, however, passing does not simply signify disappearance or loss. Rather than treating discarded wood and objects merely as materials, Sook Jin Jo receives them as beings that have passed through a time longer than human beings, holding memories of their own; and as light gets in through what remains after passing, she has discovered within them the possibility of life through art. Her attitude of regarding all things on an equal plane and posing humble questions about their relationship stands at a distance from the human-centered desire to build and anchor something solidly. The worldviews of Tao Te Ching, Caigentan, Zen Dialogues, and the Bible, which have deeply nourished the artist’s thinking, do not converge into any single doctrine or system of thought. Instead, they permeate her work as an attitude of emptying, lowering oneself, and viewing the world within a broader web of relationships. This mode of thought dismantles the boundaries between opposing terms, through which the world has long been divided in binary ways. The recurring themes encountered in her work―human beings and nature, being and non-being, matter and the world beyond it, life and death, the individual and the community―are not separate. They exist within a single network of relationships, leaning upon and connecting to one another. For Sook Jin Jo, all of these are another beginning and part of a cyclical order.
This exhibition is composed of a prologue, an epilogue, and three parts. Beginning with the prologue Witness, the exhibition continues through Part 1, Being and Non-being, Part 2, Space Between, and Part 3, The Way Things Are, before arriving at the epilogue, All Things Work Together. Across the outdoor garden and the exhibition galleries, it traces the artist’s journey of more than four decades through thematic constellations. Whereas Sook Jin Jo’s work has previously been introduced mainly through particular periods or selected bodies of work, this exhibition brings together some 100 works and materials―including major works, new works, previously unshown drawings, and archival materials―to survey the artist’s artistic practice, which has continued with remarkable consistency from her early works to her most recent projects.
Through this, the exhibition shows how the material experiments, sense of space, and thinking on existence that began in Korea in the early stages of her practice did not cease after her move to New York, but instead have expanded into an interest in discarded objects, places, and communities. In this sense, the exhibition follows the places through which Sook Jin Jo has passed, tracing her artistic practice as it has moved across both media and geographical boundaries, offering an opportunity to view her art―still not yet sufficiently examined―anew within the context of Korean contemporary art and an expanded international horizon.
