Julie Hyunkyung Cheon

Maps are one of the indicators by which we perceive the Earth, and while they contain detailed information about the land, no information is shown about the ocean. ‘Blue emptiness’ is a one-year research project to learn about the ocean, a distant world we do not know about. This work was about ‘Northsea’ located in Northern Europe and ‘Eastsea’ located in East Asia, and I traveled to each country bordering the sea, investigated each terrain and collected, classified, and analyzed objects that drifted on the beach

The sea is dynamic and carries a variety of things. The collected objects tell complex stories, from forests under the sea and landscapes of a long-ago Ice Age, to heavy metal pollution, the steel industry, the fishing industry, and even drug drug trafficking. The analyzes and experimental processes with the various materials collected from the sea aim to go beyond productivity and commercial values to learn about and understand life in the sea, trace the time and movement left behind, and gain insight into various crises. .

In this exhibition, the wall installation shows a timeline of drifting objects collected over a year, and the stories each object tells come together to weave a non-linear narrative about the sea. And the 'Rust Series' is a work that estimates the chronology of each rock through research and analysis of iron oxide contained in Northsea rocks and slag, and shows the scale of time and the process of landscape formation in color.

In the era of climate crisis, this work seek to break away from the attitude of treating the sea only as a resource or commodity and to discover the value of the sea’s existence by respecting the sea world that lives in a different time and space from ours. Through this, I would like to talk about sustainability in a different direction than before.