Nina Jun's Artist Statement[1]

Nina Jun Bio and Artist statement bio and artist statement 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 surfaces. 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.

Artist Statement to ‘Pillow-Scape’ May 20, 2009

‘Pillow-Scape’ features various stages of my ceramic pillow works; including the use of terra sigillata on surfaces, glazed and sculptural pieces, ceramic balloons, and video projections.

My motivation to start making ceramic pillows stems from my interest in how we 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 to contradict the approach of stereotypical thinking in general.

Another inspiration for my pieces was to explore the unconscious. We put our head on pillows while we sleep. I see a pillow as a metaphor of the inner 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 space between the two voids are dreams.

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 pillowscape suggests emotions: desperate, happy, quiet, anxious, isolation, destruction and creation, scared or just funny.

The other form that fascinates me besides the pillow is the balloon, a similar form swollen to contain a soft material. I am interested in capturing the vanity of the soft, puffy, airy balloon in contradicting material – hard fired ceramic. I look at balloons as objects with non-substance. I am interested in the bifacial fact that 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 disintegrates. It reminds us life is not permanent. In the lustrous colors of ceramic balloons I try to find the truth of life.

I add cast objects such as toy trains and broken airplane on top of the balloon pieces to indicate my desire to be someplace else with limitations of reality. 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 be concerned with losing individual identity.

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 allegorical aspect of pillows, I decided to be simple, blunt, honest and minimal.

Pillows and balloons are ordinary objects. It provides us comforts and joy but because of this non-provocative nature their significance in subject can be overlooked. Clay is traditionally known as heavy material. Pillows are usually 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 transform objects into subjects.