Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Nina Jun is a sculptor and multi-media artist. The phenomenon of life and death
is what matters her the most in exercising art. Her early installation works are
video inserted mounds of ceramic shards. She uses video images as internal
world of death and the mound as a physical world of life. The dome shape, which
is a traditional grave form of Korean culture, often appears in her installation
works. Her best known works are projections of moving images on sculptural sur-
faces. She builds a stage or a situation and project site specific moving images
onto them. By doing so she overlaps the real and the void into one.
In her recent works, she cast ceramic pillows and balloons. These works are
made as an attempt to discuss the truth of the surfaces and the void behind, and
phenomena between them.
use of terra sigillata on surfaces, glazed and sculptural pieces, ceramic balloons,
can perceive things differently. Pillows are domestic objects: soft, warm, plush.
They give comfort and are also playfully thrown in pillow fights. My pieces belie
the comfortable, easy and conforming softness of pillows. I made ceramic pillows
universe where our unconscious mind lives, a world where our memories and
dreams reside.
The hollow space inside of the ceramic pillows reminds me of a womb where life
is conceived and is nurtured. Also I perceive the same hollow space as a place
where life will rest underground. For these reasons I have a special attachment
to the void underneath the hard shell of the ceramic pillow as an interpretation of
a space of life’s beginning and ending. I like to believe sometimes the time and
I focused on surfaces with the use of terra sigillata. The glazed pieces with cast
objects were made from an intent to with the inside space; as a manifestation of
the unconscious mind. The scale relationship between toy sized objects and life
size pillows fascinates me to sculpt the stories of dreams. The glazes I used on
these pieces are matt finish, trying to save the soft feeling of fabrics.
Casting these forms from molds reminds me that our lives have similar
beginnings. Our lives come from a mold called the uterus. When we are born
from our mother’s womb we are anonymous. We are given our names as we
start life and we build our identity as we become unique individuals. The forms
cast have no names initially, but when I put them together, they become unique
pieces. As they develop, I give each of them a title. Every aspect of each pillow-
The other form that fascinates me besides the pillow is the balloon, a similar form
soft, puffy, airy balloon in contradicting material – hard fired ceramic. I look at
the void exists under the glossy colorful surface of mylar balloons. This puffiness
of a balloon is a manifestation of time elements of life; as the air deflates the time
I add cast objects such as toy trains and broken airplane on top of the balloon
Through the metallically glazed balloons and toys I also read the heights of
materialism. In our modern society where things are mass produced, we might
Video projections on ceramics are the melding of two very different materials,
which consists of a moment and an eternity (video and ceramic). They blur the
difference between the two temporal states. Is the pillow in its easily torn fabric
form more permanent than the ceramic pillows in their breakable shells? I think
that eternity exists in fragile moments and in how one perceives these moments.
My last pieces I made for this show are concentrated on the essential form of
pillows. They are glazed in black, white and metallic. After exploring the
Pillows and balloons are ordinary objects. It provides us comforts and joy but
placed on the chair, bed or sofa. By making the ceramic pillows to hang from
the wall like paintings, I try to break the norms of our general perception. I
discover the philosophy beneath the surfaces of objects and matters, and