Jihyun Jung: Image, Object, Space
Andy St. Louis (Art Critic)
Images of architectural liminality suffuse the photographic oeuvre of Jihyun Jung, who focuses his gaze on buildings in transitional states of construction or demolition. As such, his photos are populated with various construction materials, each with its own specific aesthetic function within a given building’s complex visual scheme – wall panels, sheet glass and other superficial elements that lend a polished appearance to architectural surfaces. However, the true subjects of his work are images themselves; Jung serves as a witness to the creation and destruction of built structures by selectively capturing singular moments during this process and indefinitely perpetuating the fleeting realities that he photographs as enduring objects of contemplation. It is this ontological imperative that distinguishes his practice from the realm of pure architectural photography in the style of Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer, whose works reflect a detached stance toward representing architectural space. By contrast, Jung’s subjective approach relies on a nuanced sensibility toward visual material that he forges through prolonged engagement with the structures he photographs. Nowhere is this more evident than in two of his most recent bodies of work, which document the past and present of modern architecture in the Korean capital.
3-1
Originally built in 1970, the Samil Building was South Korea’s first skyscraper, rising 31 floors above street level in a nod to South Korea’s March 1st (3-1) Independence Movement. The Samil Building stood as the country’s tallest structure for nearly a decade, becoming a point of pride for Koreans and a physical manifestation of modernization and economic growth in South Korea. Its dark-tinted glass facade expressed an imposing monumentality that shielded its interior volume from view by day; at night, it seemed to come alive with the reflections of endless columns of cars passing directly in front of its southern facade via a newly-built expressway through Seoul’s commercial district. In time, the aspirational affiliations of the Samil Building would be eclipsed by newer, shinier buildings, and the novelty of its rational, modernist design would later be considered
a relic of state-sponsored industrialization and unchecked urban development in the capital. Today, however, some 50 years after its completion, the building has undergone an aesthetic overhaul by Korean firm Junglim Architecture – its tinted glass replaced with transparent panes and its interior completely remodeled – yet the Samil Building’s iconic status in the canon of Korean architectural history has been preserved for decades to come.
The Samil Building was designed by Kim Chung-up (1922-1988), one of Korea’s preeminent first-generation modern architects. His bold vision for the project was to ensconce the building’s weight-bearing structural elements with glass curtain walls that gave the building a sleek, uniform appearance reminiscent of the Seagram Building (1958), designed by Mies van der Rohe in New York more than a decade prior.1) In fact, by the time Kim set to work on the Samil Building, glass-clad facades were already becoming common throughout North America, thanks to the influence of Mies and other architects who ascribed to the so-called International Style of architecture. Their style was characterized by a spartan, utilitarian framework that relied on a liberal use of industrial building materials like concrete, steel and glass. Such design principles not only informed Kim’s approach to conceptualizing the Samil Building, but also left an enduring impact on the trajectory of modern architecture into the late twentieth century and beyond.
473
Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have spent the better part of four decades distilling and refining the traditions of modern architecture – and the International Style itself – into highly concentrated design rhetoric premised upon an inextricable link between function and form. The foremost practical considerations behind their architectural rhetoric are dictated by each building’s purpose and the intended use of its spaces; by operating within these parameters, Herzog and de Meuron adopt a pragmatic approach to sculpting form and volume, allowing the specific floor slab of each building site to dictate its structure’s overall form.2) Moreover, unorthodox uses of materials in their work, and the broad range of construction techniques that they necessitate, bespeak an aesthetic vernacular that alternates between minimalism and extravagance.
1) Hyon-sob Kim, “[Re-Visit SPACE] Samilro Building in ‘Kim Chung-up Architecture Exhibition,’” SPACE, May 2021, https://vmspace.com/eng/report/report_view.html?base_seq=MTQ2Nw==
2) Michael Holt & Marissa Looby, “Beyond the wall, the floor,” Australian Design Review, June 17, 2014, https://www.australiandesignreview.com/architecture/beyond-the-wall-the-floor/?utm_ medium=website&utm_source=archdaily.com
To date, Herzog and de Meuron have developed more than 500 architectural projects around the world. It wasn’t until project #473, however, that the Swiss architects made their South Korean debut: the ST SONGEUN Building (2021), an 11-story triangular tower in Seoul that presents a monolithic vision of International Style architecture. True to fashion, Herzog and de Meuron embraced the intrinsic limitations of the building site and its surrounding neighborhood as design cues; namely, a compact volumetric envelope led the architects to conceive of an angular geometry that maximizes the building’s height and interior space, while incorporating a slanted rear facade that exploits the sculptural allowances of applicable zoning laws. The striking silhouette born from these particular limitations also informs the programming of the ST SONGEUN Building’s interior space, restricting the placement of its core infrastructure – elevators, stairwells and ventilation systems – to the very front of the building, which accounts for the dearth of windows in its street-facing concrete facade and lends the building a distinctly austere appearance. Herzog and de Meuron’s iconic design for the ST SONGEUN Building balances the minimal aesthetic of Mies with a keen sensitivity toward integrated materiality that subverts the monumentality of the building’s facade, and artisanal techniques that are used to finish its interior and exterior surfaces evince a contemporary reinterpretation of the rationalindustrial architectural logic intrinsic to the International Style. The structure’s defining formal attribute is a liberal use of bare concrete throughout its construction; interestingly, however, rather than opting for the conventional concrete formwork that generates smooth and uniform surfaces, the architects substituted thousands of square plywood boards that imprint their organic patterns of natural wood grain onto the building’s exterior. Meanwhile, a ramp leading from the street to the building’s underground parking area evinces remarkable attention to detail with its driving surface of inlaid stonework and its walls and ceiling covered in silver leaf. The craftsmanship required to execute these and other aspects of the ST SONGEUN Building’s construction bespeaks the extraordinary level of care and consideration that went into its design and construction.
Contingency and Connection
During the months and years that Jihyun Jung spends observing, contemplating and recording buildings in states of change, he formulates images that are neither theatrical nor contrived, but in fact forthright and authentic. Temporary scenes of construction and demolition that appear in his photos assume materiality at the moment they are captured by his camera, whereupon they preserve a present that is destined to disappear. While at first existing only as digital assets stored among a vast array of photo files on various
hard drives, these images become invested with the tangible presence of objecthood once they are displayed as physical prints. In this way, the transformation from image to object corresponds to the architectural process from initial design to completed edifice, suggesting an indelible link between images and architecture. This connection was first formalized by Robert Venturi in the 1970s, but it was Herzog and de Meuron who systematized a strategy of “applied imagery” in their practice, which manifests as an increased “relation of contingency between the formal effects of the image and the architecture.”3) As such, Herzog and de Meuron’s architecture can be reasonably interpreted as an accumulation of images and the realities they memorialize.
Photography offers an apt means for exploring the contingent relationship between image and architecture. By invoking the transitive property, the innate interdependence of images and architecture becomes clear: if images and architecture can both be considered objects, then images and architecture must both depend on the same principles to define their existence within the physical world. Kim Chung-up sought to exploit this relationship after completing the Samil Building, when he actively commissioned photographers to produce images of the project in an effort to favorably manipulate public opinion toward the monolithic mass of glass and steel that he had designed. Likewise, Herzog and de Meuron’s recurring collaborations with Swiss photographer Thomas Ruff dating back to the early 1990s underscore the efficacy of so-called applied imagery as a tool for compounding the potency of architectural expression.
By contrast, Jung authentically visualizes objective reality through a profoundly subjective lens that relies on extended engagement with ephemeral subjects. During the protracted timeframes in which he documents various architectural projects, he attunes himself to the temporary images that arise in the course of their construction or demolition and records them before they disappear forever. Sometimes, Jung’s process assumes an agency of its own, as in his photos of construction waste that accumulated during the interior remodeling of the Samil Building (Reconstruct, 2020-21); at other times, however, he simply preserves the scenes that he encounters during his regular visits to the work site, a strategy that yielded sublime images of the ST SONGEUN Building by highlighting the interaction between raw concrete, earth and steel (Structure Studies - Topology, 201921). Whether deliberate or spontaneous, each of these photos reflects the conditional relations of images and architecture, instilling both with a visual subjectivity that renders them meaningful.
Structure Studies - Topology #01_6101, Pigment Print, 210x160cm, 2019
Synthetic Experience
Throughout Jung’s work, images operate as spaces as well as objects. These spaces are inherently liminal, since the viewer’s presence – as a proxy for the camera – is essential to concretize the reality contained within each photo. By occupying a specific position in space, the viewer thereby imposes an unequivocal visual perspective that distorts and alters the relationships among photographic subjects; moreover, mental images that arise in response to architecture can only be perceived in the context of specific spatial environments, since each site is infused with its own distinguishing characteristics that influence its building’s final form. Just as Herzog and de Meuron substantiate the notion that “mental images are built from particular successive perceptual acts in spatialized visual experience,”4) Jung inextricably links his extended periods of engagement with architectural space to an acuity of spatial cognition. His production process thus mirrors that of an architect, beginning with prolonged consideration of each localized context that influences the final form and content of his photos.
There is a consolidated continuum of future, present and past that takes shape in Jung’s world of images. When the wooden boards used to form the ST SONGEUN Building’s concrete exterior are peeled back to reveal the hardened artificial surface beneath, their imprint leaves a physical trace of the moment at which the past becomes the future. Jung accentuates the organic wood patterns that are ingrained in this instant and visualizes distinct temporal trajectories that proceed in opposite directions, with one moving toward the future and the other toward the past. Other images that he captures dozens of meters below ground level reflect a sense of geological history, where he documents the intersection of steel and solid bedrock at the deepest point of the building’s foundation. In so doing, he offers viewers a perspective into the deep past as well as the foreseeable future, thereby highlighting the point of inflection that the building itself represents.
A more compressed temporality can be seen in Jung’s photos of the Samil Building, where the vestiges of past architecture litter scenes of renovation and renewal. Here, he operates as an architectural biographer, contemplating the manifold histories that have been inscribed in the 50-year-old building as he documents the transformations that will reconfigure its visual identity in the future. His gaze is more focused in these photos, with an eye toward the intersecting timelines that can be discerned in intimate moments of encounter between elements of architectural heritage and the updated aesthetics taking their place. Jung’s comprehensive record of such encounters serves to plot points
4) Ibid
along the ambiguous timeline of a present still in progress; his images of objects and construction materials in various states of regeneration constitute an essential archive of architectural history itself by preserving the precise time and space of generational change taking place within Seoul’s constantly-shifting skyline.
