KB News Desk
Entering Sook Jin Jo’s exhibition at Seoul Museum of Art’s Nam-Seoul branch, visitors encounter reclaimed railroad ties, weathered rafters and discarded timber.
At first, the atmosphere feels solemn. But the longer one lingers, the more the abandoned materials seem to pulse with unexpected vitality. Despite using materials that evoke decay and mortality, the exhibition is not about death. It is about how life emerges from what has been left behind.
“I don’t treat death as something dark,” Jo said in an interview with The Korea Herald on Wednesday, the opening day of her solo show. “I create life.”
The exhibition surveys four decades of installations, sculptures, photography and sound works rooted in reclaimed materials.
Among the most striking is “All Things are Born of Being III.” Branches appear to burst from the circular openings of a discarded wine rack. The work reflects Jo’s enduring fascination with materials that others abandon.
“These are things people once used and discarded. Even if we can’t restore them to what they once were, they still carry the energy and resonance of the people who lived with them,” the artist said.
That philosophy also underpins her long-running “Witness” series, one of the exhibition’s central bodies of work.
Installed across the museum’s outdoor garden and stairwell, “Witness II” layers recordings of Jeju Island’s wind and rain with children’s voices, trains and gunfire that evoke the passage of human history.
“We always think from our own perspective,” she said. “But trees can live for hundreds or even thousands of years. I wanted to see the history of humanity through their eyes.”
The idea continues in “Witness IV,” an installation occupying the second-floor corridor. Constructed from discarded rafters salvaged from traditional Korean hanok houses, the work transforms architectural remnants into silent witnesses to generations of everyday life.
Jo’s relationship with mortality began long before she became an artist.
She recalled thinking about death from middle school, imagining fires, accidents and moments of danger while wondering how life might suddenly end.
“I kept thinking that one day we would simply become dust,” she said. “The idea that even our thoughts would disappear felt strange to me.”
That lifelong curiosity later evolved into a habit of visiting cemeteries wherever she traveled. Her photographic series “Elegy,” documenting cemeteries on Brazil’s Itaparica Island over three years, grew from a piece of writing she encountered during an artist residency: “To contemplate death is true philosophy.”
“It was as though everything I had been thinking about was summarized in one sentence,” she recalled.
She said cemeteries have never frightened her.
“There is something about them that makes you humble,” she said. “People become too busy with life, but those who have come close to death let many things go.”
Asked whether wandering through cemeteries was unsettling, she jokingly said: “You know, people are more frightening.”
She recalled that even as a 6-year-old, when adults asked what she feared most, her answer was never tigers or wild animals, but people.
Her meditation on mortality became deeply personal in 2005, when she learned that her younger brother had died unexpectedly.
Three years later, during a residency on Itaparica Island, she created the performance “Crossroads.” Gathering discarded pieces of wood, she made them into simple wooden crosses, inscribing them with imagined years.
She planted them along the shoreline, retrieved them as the tide carried them away and finally burned them in a ritual of mourning.
“Death allows us to think that perhaps there is something beyond,” she said.
Her artistic philosophy emerged despite an unconventional path. Though she did not study fine art as an undergraduate, Jo entered Hongik University’s graduate school after overcoming her family’s opposition.
During her first semester, a professor told her that plywood was “not a good material (for duality).” Rather than abandoning it, she embraced it.
“That’s when I thought, ‘This is exactly what I should do,'” she said. “It (plywood) became perfect for experimentation.”
“I still enjoy making art so much. That’s probably why I continue to do it.”
The exhibition “Sook Jin Jo: That’s How the Light Gets In” runs through Nov. 15.
