Evergreen Tower, Yeondoo Jung's photography

Yeondoo Jung Evergreen Tower

Untilted, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, 2001.

Untilted, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, 2001.

Untilted, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, 2001.

Untilted, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, 2001.

Untilted, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, 2001.

Untilted, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, 2001.

Untilted, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, 2001.

Untilted, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, 2001.

Untilted, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, 2001.

Untilted, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, 2001.

Artist's Statement

Apparently, life style gets rather repetitive in Evergreen Tower. Modern Seoul city attracts all sorts of people from the whole country for many reasons. Some of them work at factories and the others at office. The nesting ground for these home seekers in the ‘stranger’s city’ – Seoul, is the Evergreen Tower

150 square feet of identical living room spaces are heavenly ground for the tired salary men who return from their hardworking routine to find warm hearted families waiting for them. A modern loving family scene can be easily started in this concrete square tower.

Evergreen Tower consists of thirty-two family portraits from an apartment block in Gwangin-gu Gwangjang-dong, Seoul. I visited thirty-two families in their houses and took portraits of the people in their living room. Since all the families live in the same building, the architectural structure is the same except the changes in decoration and the family.

I was trying to portrait the individual life of the nuclear families within the mass production houses of the Seoul city.

About the photographer

Born

1969, Jinju, South Korea

Nationality

Korean

Based in

South Korea

About Yeondoo Jung

Yeondoo Jung is one of Korea’s leading contemporary artists. He studied in Seoul and the UK, graduating with an MFA from Goldsmiths College, the University of London in 1997. In 2007 he received the prestigious Artist of the Year award from the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, accompanied by an exhibition. His work has been included in the Taipei Biennial (2006), Venice Biennale (2005), Gwangju Biennial (2004, 2006), Istanbul Biennial (2003) and the Liverpool Biennial (2004). He has had many solo exhibitions in Europe, Asia and the United States, most recently Handmade Memories at Tina Kim Gallery, New York and Cinemagician, at CREAM International Festival for Arts and Media Yokohama 2009, Bank Art, Yokohama. His work has also been featured in many group exhibitions throughout the world, most recently at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and at the Asia Society, New York. In 2010, he was one of the artists who took part in Chaotic Harmony: Contemporary Korean Photography at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. His many awards include the 2008 Today’s Young Artist Award from the Korean Ministry of Culture and the Seoul second prize in the 2002 Shanghai Biennale Asia-Europe Culture Foundation Awards. Yeondoo Jung’s work is also featured in public and private collections throughout the world.