Jeon Joonho

Jeon Joonho is best known for his parodic video animations laced with political satire, but his first solo exhibition in Japan marks a return to his roots as a sculptor. Previous works borrowed heavily from political iconography and visual puns––The White House, 2005–2006, for instance, portrays the American presidential residence as a literally opaque institution, whose windows are painted over one by one. Here, however, Jeon plays loosely with “magic realism” by reworking a number of religious symbols into uncanny sculptures, with mixed results.

Sweet Valentine, 2008–2009, consists of two warrior statues carved out of dark gingko wood. Standing in a triumphant pose, each with one arm akimbo atop a bed of gold-plated fiberglass and resin roses, their faces are gouged out by a buoyant golden ribbon that makes an exuberant swirl over their heads in the shape of a heart. The work gleefully gilds over its own vernacular material with a glossy golden finish and is seemingly obsessed with a flashy consumer culture that pummels the senses.

Untitled, 2009, combines his satiric video animations within a sculpture. Here, a glass-paned coffin contains a cloth-wrapped corpse whose withered hands cradle a small votive tablet that screens endless reruns of a crucifixion scene. Is this what believers in the afterlife can look forward to––the promise of resurrection in high-resolution Technicolor, with an inexhaustible supply of cheap thunderclaps for reassurance and dramatic effect? More eloquent, perhaps, is Jeon’s simple animated drama that unfolds within the landscape printed on a fifty-won note. Welcome, 2009, shows helicopters affiliated with an unnamed military presence in the process of constructing large capital letters that spell out WELCOME along a mountain in the host country, before one of them crashes and causes a conflagration in the fields below––a quiet requiem for American imbroglios on the Korean Peninsula.