Sunwoo Jung
Sunwoo Jung is a South Korean ceramic artist currently living and working in Amsterdam. With a fascination for ceramics, and based on continued interest in everyday objects, she questions the functionality, efficiency, and clarity of the society. By reconfiguring found objects and combining them with ceramics, she wishes to purposefully deconstruct their functions and convert them into equivocal beings, or to create illusionary scenes in which the presence recalls absence, leading to the imagination.
She engages clay as a bridge between reality and imagination, bringing the sense of time into play. Through her ongoing practices, she ambitiously aims to unearth the value of opaque things that are vanishing in the domain of time and brings them up to the surface of today's rapid wave.
The lamp series Sunwoo showcased at Collectible 2024 in Brussels humorously portrays variations in form and surface that reflect her dedicated exploration of ceramics as a material. Sunwoo attempts to reconcile the conventional technique of ceramics and the contemporary design of everyday objects through continuous experiments on forms and research in glazes.
Sunwoo Jung delves into alternative methods of crafting everyday objects beyond mass production, placing value on functionality, tactility, and daily emotions. The lamp series Sunwoo showcased at Collectible 2024 in Brussels humorously portrays variations in form and surface that reflect her dedicated exploration of ceramics as a material. Sunwoo attempts to reconcile the conventional technique of ceramics and the contemporary design of everyday objects through continuous experiments on forms and research in glazes.
Sunwoo creates her unique glaze recipes through extensive experimentation, embracing trial and error. She challenges traditional methods by mixing various glazes to achieve distinct colors and textures. Often, the form of her objects is inspired by the glaze itself. For example, the ""Fungi Mushroom Lamp"" was shaped like a mushroom to complement the glaze she developed, which resembles yellow fungus spreading across the surface.
Concerned about the disposable nature of everyday objects made from plastic or other industrial materials, Sunwoo wanted to counter this trend. Her series of ceramic lamps reflects her belief that daily objects can be both valuable and enduring, designed to be cherished for years to come.
Tiny Friends is an ever-growing group of ceramic miniature chairs. The procedure of Sunwoo creating miniature chair sculptures is similar to that of sewing garments. A comparable working procedure employing the slab-building technique was employed in constructing these ceramic chair miniatures, just as the volume generated from flat fabric by cutting and connecting the pieces of patterns and becoming the garments to carry a human body.
There are certain patterns in the form of a chair just like making clothes. Legs supporting the human body bring it up from the floor, flat or concave top where the body part touches, and optionally the backrests and armrests.
Clay as a mass is flattened to a paper-like state by squashing and rolling it, then it gradually regains volume by cutting into pieces freely and fitting them together with improvisation. She bodily feels the clay as a material, coming and going in both plane and solid space, building the volume to an unknown direction. Tiny chairs are an accumulation of expression based on her everyday emotions.
Since the COVID-19 lockdown began, it has been hard to work on large sculptures in a remote situation, so it naturally started as a small work that can be done at home, which has continued since then. Rather than chairs as a functional tool, they play as an accumulation of expression with various forms, colors, and surfaces based on her everyday emotions.
She decided to name each piece after her friends because, in a way, she thought they are a new kind of object as if they have their own identities, instead of the single function of the chair.
