OpZicht: Yeon Sung 'Matters, Acts'

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23 June - 1 August 2021
Location: Hogewal 1-9, The Hague

Yeon Sung is fascinated by the perception of physical and digital Matter and the way they behave. This is the focus of her artistic research. For the installation Matters, Acts, she resorts to a green screen technique to investigate this relationship and difference. The artwork consists of two parts - one on the location of Stroom and the second one is a live stream on YouTube. At Stroom, Yeon Sung invites the audience to enter the installation, to observe and encounter the transcendence of Matter through the physical and digital space.
Upon entering the installation at Stroom visitors agree to participate in the live stream.

The Matter Trilogy
Yeon Sung's ongoing long-term project The Matter Trilogy investigates the critical materiality of three selected matters using an interdisciplinary approach, including visualization, scientific installation and an essay, aimed at exposing complex socio-economic narratives.
Rusty Odyssey, the first part of the trilogy, traces copper as an inheritor of colonial capitalism in The Netherlands, Japan, and Korea, from the 18th century to the present-day. This experimental documentary is included in the installation Matters, Acts.
Yeon Sung is currently working on the second part of the trilogy, Phantom Menace2.5 (PM2.5), which draws upon Fine Particulate Matter—PM2.5, its colonial legacy and traces in data.

Rusty Odyssey - I
Experimental Documentary Film / 14'25" / 2020
Rusty Odyssey depicts the colonial faces of three copper coins (VOC Duit, Japanese Sen, and Euro coin) tracing their guilty chronicle from the 18th century till the present day in the Netherlands, Japan, and Korea. Transcending time and territories, the film cuts the temporal dimension of the geographies where the coins were born and follows the transformation of the monetary material as vitalized by capital. Rusty Odyssey reveals the colonial phantom behind the faces of the coins through the sites in which history is staged. The fluctuating heartbeat of copper—an inheritor of colonial capitalism—still lives on.

Yeon Sung
Yeon Sung (KR) is an artist-researcher and graphic designer living in The Hague and Seoul. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague in 2019. In her artistic practice, she questions how human ideologies are embedded in non-human materials, by focusing on the subject of  ‘Matter'.