Jody Graf
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck” — Paul Virilio
The word “disaster” derives from Latin for “without star,” in other words without luck (under a bad star) but also without light. The history of art is replete with depictions of disaster that have attempted to illuminate accidents and miseries of all kinds. Jacques Callot’s Les Grandes Misères de la guerre (1633), Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819), Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831), Käthe Kollwitz’s The Survivors (1923), Bruce Connor’s Crossroads (1976): these are just a few famous instances of works that have attempted to distill the chaos of wars, shipwrecks, tsunamis, and nuclear explosions into the relative stability—digestibility—of the image. If such work has often served to forewarn and memorialize, it also runs the risk of aestheticizing suffering. The rise of Romanticism in the 18th century, for example, emerged in tandem with the popularity of the aristocratic “Grand Tour” of Greco-Roman ruins, fomenting linkages between sublimity, contemplation, nationalism, and catastrophe—the original disaster tourism—that continue to reverberate.
The work of Jung Eugene slices into this history, cleaving space for a question of what it means to engage disaster as a contemporary artist today. For the 2024 Busan Biennale, encountering a scene of destruction or reconstruction—a snake eating its own tail. As an affront to the smooth functioning of globalized trade, piracy has long symbolized an escape hatch from capitalism. By the same token, it also creates states of exception in which the violent and individualistic profit-seeking endemic to capitalism are amplified. Jung might be seen as suggesting the ways in which contemporary art is similarly frustrated, its own attempts at agitation somehow reinforcing the system it seeks to circumvent.
An earlier work by Jung titled Pirated Future, from 2019, also touches on such catastrophic states of exception. It is a longform video that ruminates on two recent disasters—Chernobyl and Fukushima—through interviews with people who experienced these tragedies firsthand, as well as those that have incorporated these horrors as a kind of material in their life and work. Jung speaks with a Japanese artist who creates colorful collages that conjoin images of tsunamis and earthquakes with anime figures, echoing the uncanny crashing together of disparate images endemic to the contemporary mediascape. In another clip, a newscaster notes the 2020 “Recovery Olympics,” marketed as a moment of economic revitalization in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. In Chernobyl, Jung converses with the proprietor of a company offering tours of the “forbidden zone.” We see tourists wandering through abandoned homes and schools with radiation detectors, hunting for traces of lingering danger. “I won. I got victory,” he states—not without cynicism—having successfully turned his trauma into profit.
Pirated Future, like W💀W (Waves of Wreckage), traffics in a critical ambivalence, asking what place art has in such discourses, when images of disasters circulate ad infinitum. The works also suggest a related, and pressing question of what, exactly, disaster looks like in our contemporary moment, and who profits? Writing in 2005, the theorist Paul Virilio noted that: “We used to have in situ accidents, accidents that had particular, specific impacts; but now there are general accidents, in other words integral accidents, accidents that integrate other accidents just as Chernobyl continuously integrated the phenomenon of contamination.” We live in a time of distended crises: forever wars, lingering pandemics, environmental collapse, economic precarity. On the one hand, these events have never been imaged as frequently; on the other hand, their scale—both microscopic and immense, literally environmental— and steady progression renders them harder than ever to see.
During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 (another ongoing disaster that we speak of as over, but which we in fact have adapted to live with) Jung’s approach shifted to consider these durational, insidious cataclysms, many of which are, as theorist Ariella Azoulay puts it, “regime-made” disasters. The video Shin-Toad (2021) opens with a shot of a hand pushing sand over a scale model of tracts of high-rise apartment buildings, burying them in mountains the size of a palm. The work is a rumination on the purposeful destruction, and subsequent redevelopment, of the apartment complex in Gangnam where Jung grew up, told through the perspectives of Jung’s mother and brother. A bitcoin enthusiast, the brother notes that many have entered the cryptocurrency markets to make seed money to invest in real estate. “Humans are animals that move in search of profit,” he notes. “Land value soars when it gets redeveloped. I can’t wish them not to make money just to linger on beautiful memories.” Throughout the video, Jung pans to shots of the actual housing blocks, which, half-demolished, exist in a suspended and indeterminate state between one thing coming down and another rising.
Since moving to New York City in 2024, Jung has begun collecting detritus from the streets and many construction sites throughout the city, transforming industrial debris— corrugated metal, plastic—into abstract sculptures both elegant and menacing. Titled Earthmovers, the series echoes the clanging, churning movements of heavy machinery brought into clear ground and rebuild. Jung notes: “There’s this endless cycle: digging into the ground, then building up toward the sky. That rhythm—constant excavation and elevation—feels like a metaphor for the collapse I’m interested in.” When a disaster happens, someone is paid to come in and clean up. Earth-moving equipment, bulldozers. NGOs. Developers. In 1942, economist Joseph Schumpeter famously wrote of the “perennial gale of creative destruction” endemic to capitalism, which must tear down old economic structures—physical or immaterial—in order to seek new realms of profit. In other words, it needs the storm in order to have another ship to build.