Junho Jang uses carefully selected pieces of wood from his surrounding space as art materials. They are trimmed and cut along their outer surface, combined, or presented in their original form to elevate the unique shape and properties of tree branches as aesthetic objects. Jang’s work, which presents a metaphor by introducing natural objects into an institutional frame, can be seen as a succession of the anti-industrial art strategy that aimed to escape from civilized culture and return to Nature, evoking experiences before language.
Neon, an industrial product newly introduced in Junho Jang’s recent works, reminds us of the work of Arte Povera sculptor Mario Merz, who took a unique and complex gesture against the reactionary attitude of returning to pre-industrial materials and procedures. However, Jang's use of neon is not intended to directly convey an explicit message through the medium of text symbols; it intends to function as a poetic device as well as a result of a formative act of imitating the shape of tree branches by means of neon light.
The exquisite correspondence between the shape of the tree branch, which the artist cut and trimmed through physical labor, and the neon lighting elaborately produced by the technician follows the branch line. This can be said to be the artist's dialectical artistic plan to reflect the fundamental purity of natural objects. Here, we face a tense relationship between the primitiveness of the craftsmanship inherent in the artist's hand and the scientific and technological modernity dictated by the neon light. At the same time, the viewer experiences the unique duality of enjoying the drawing in space of artificial light, which seems to depict the appearance of natural objects as they are.
The sculpture that occupies the largest 3-dimensional space in this exhibition is a variation of 6 Lines for 4 Points created by the artist in 2020. The triangular pyramid-shaped sculpture created by cutting and joining six bent tree branches is called the ‘most perfect shape’ realized by the combination of ‘perfect lines’. Neon lighting, which represents and adds one of the six tree lines, crosses the space in the dark and emits light as if it were a living organism containing ‘life’ and ‘possibilities’.
Through the exhibition hall, a curved tree branch stretched out on the floor reveals its presence with a neon light that resembles a skin on its back. Wouldn't this also be the irony of artificial lighting that tried to draw along the most 'natural' lines that can only be found in Nature? A little step away, a wooden body that seems to be standing on four legs is likewise showing off its flexible lines with neon light. These two works even seem enough to be mistaken for living beings capable of autonomous movement according to the viewer's imagination.
As another new art material, Junho Jang uses plywood that still has the physical properties of trees yet is the product of, and hints at the effects of extreme industrialization. The work is installed on the wall, matching it with a circular vacuum tube emitting neon light. According to the artist, this work is an attempt to symbolically depict quasi-nature that mimics natural phenomena such as the lunar eclipse through the harmony of plywood and neon. Junho Jang's work, which boldly overturns the binary relationship between cold industrial materials and warm traces of life, and presents variations of light and line. This paradoxically reminds us of aesthetician Wilhelm Worringer's art theory.
Worringer divides the artistic will (Kunstwollen), which is the fundamental psychological desire of humans, into abstraction and empathy. This sets the relationship between the two as a mutually opposed pair. However, in Junho Jang's quasi-natural form, the two tendencies are not opposing. Rather, Jang's wood-neon sculptures can be interpreted as an aesthetic dialectic of 'empathic abstraction' that approaches abstraction through artistic imitation of natural objects, that is, neon light following the shapes of natural objects.
The aesthetic pleasure in the flexible beauty of natural objects presents itself when humans and nature form a friendly relationship, evokes the empathic art will, and creates a naturalistic art style that represents the world. On the other hand, Bohringer's dualistic view is that the feeling of disharmony formed when humans and the world are in confrontation establishes abstract art form, rather than a realistic representation of nature.
Junho Jang's work shows the potentiality of infinite variations in that he takes an organic approach that fuses the two opposites of the return to nature and the progress of civilization. As a silent but dynamic banquet of light and line, Jang’s work provides the viewer a pleasure of sensing poetic metaphor along with formative beauty.
2023. 2
