Oum Jeongsoon

Born 1961 | Chungju
Lives and works Seoul

Oum Jeongsoon has retraced the long journey of an elephant that had first arrived in Korea about 600 years ago, departing from Indonesia via Japan, and finally being exiled in Jangdo island, located at the end of South Jeolla. The installation titled Elephant without Trunk 2023 is an extension of Oum’s earlier project, in which people can experience the largest animal on Earth in diverse ways. The purpose of the work is to let the audience experience the animal by touching. Through out history, the elephant has generally been described as a metaphor for typicality, normality, and strangeness (as opposed to familiarity), or lacking. Oum reinterprets the elephants through the experiences of people with visual impairments based on their auditory, olfactory, and tactile senses, and re-presents them in an enlarged form. These forms of the elephant, on the border of the original and abnormality, encourage us to contemplate various ways of recognising the world. The elephant without a trunk reveals the artist’s way of seeing the world by representing the existences that are often excluded from or made invisible in the realm of normality. Each piece is framed with steel pipes and covered with a large patchwork.

Oum Jeongsoon, Elephant without trunk 2023. Iron sheet, wool and fabric. 300×274×307cm. Courtesy the artist, Commissioned by the 14th Gwangju Biennale. Installation view, 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023). Image courtesy Gwangju Biennale Foundation. Photo: glimworkers