brilliant 30: Sekyun Ju

As a major part of Ju Sekyun's body of work, the Tracing Drawing series explores the artist’s present self through encounters with familiar traditions that he wishes to pass on, expressed through porcelain. For Ju, the conflicted boundary between past and present is a reminder of the artist's unique identity. The gap is experienced as a sort of warp between his present reality and cherished, familiar traditions; these experiences lay the foundation for his artistic perspective.
 
Every white porcelain piece in the Tracing Drawing series was created by the artist on a pottery wheel, complete with hand-drawn graphite images of valuable traditional artifacts laid onto the surface. The graphite patterns and designs were drawn based on how the artist perceived and remembers the artifact. What we find on the surfaces of the porcelain pieces is similar, yet upon closer observation, the very fine details of national treasures and this pottery are dissimilar. Sekyun Ju deliberately widens the distance between his artistic reproduction and the real, in order to ultimately convey a sense of the 'insecurity that our contemporaries experience.' Standards and definitions and the existing way of things are confronted by unforeseeable contemporary situations, warping and twisting, offsetting our sense of equilibrium. Heuristically, that rift is cause for agitation and insecurity. The artist visually expresses contemporary anxiety through "discontinuous patterns” in his works.

The patterns found in Ju's works were originally familiar; they underwent processes of variation, transformation, derivation and mediation. The result is the product of a wholly different process with different standards. Something incomplete and partial is created amid abrasion and conflict on the tangent of time, which, at a different point, may be a tradition; a starting point for another tangent. The 'impetus for novelty' as presented by the artist may be understood as the past-present-future communicating without respite, in a 'wheel of time.' To develop the idea further, the artist's creative impetus is drawn from tradition, which we easily forget or consider mundane. The artist's traditional treatment of porcelain works was a result of a dialectic between his past and present selves suggests that today is not a severance, but an interaction with the past.
 
In the way that our past traditions affect our present, our contemporary practices will one day become the past - a tradition. In the present era which is fixated on change served by speed and quantity, Sekyun Ju's works ask the viewer for a moment of pause, to reflect on the distance covered and to consider the path ahead.