Ji-Yeon Sung — Acte ordinaire — Marie Cini Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 10 → April 21, 2012

Gallery Marie Cini presents a series of unedited photographs by Korean artist Ji-Yeon Sung, titled Acte ordinaire (Ordinary act).

When looking at the photographs by Ji-Yeon Sung, the viewer is confronted with carefully dramatized characters, heroes of everyday situations. However, fairly quickly, discomfort settles in. The scenes at first appear ordinary but in fact are completely incongrous, which provokes a feeling of strangeness within the viewer. We are at the heart of Ji-Yeon Sung’s artistic process, which questions the strange within the mundane. This questioning leads us to the freudian concept of “ uncanny ” or “ unheimlice ” in German, also translated as “ disturbing familiarity ” or “ eerie familiar ”. In his essay published in 1919, Freud analysed the malaise created from a rupture in the comfort of the rationality in everyday life. Ji-Yeon Sung’s approach consists primarily of sensing invisible mental states that are beyond physical presence. The artist seeks to make visible, by photography, the contrast that exists between the outer silence and the inner tension of the individual. The disturbance that the spectator feels in viewing the images putting them in the place of the model.

The series of photographs presented at Gallery Marie Cini, Acte ordinaire (Ordinary act), was started in Bretagne during an artist’s residency. This series introduces us to a new facet of the artistic process of Ji-Yeon Sung, who usually invites the models to pose in her studio. For the first time, the artist went to the home strangers, transforming their place of life and work into a studio. Before the models pose, the artist takes the time to get to know the people, listen to them talk. The resulting images are grounded in an everyday undisguised reality but Ji-Yeon adds, as usual, a theatrical dimension. It is that which transforms these ordinary situations into extraordinary moments.

Ji-Yeon Sung was born in Korea in 1976. She lives and works in Paris.