Claire Monneraye, Curator, Australian Centre for Photography

“White is a deep, absolute silence, full of possibility. Black is nothingness without possibility, an eternal silence without hope, and corresponds with death."
-Concerning the Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912, Wassily Kandinsky

Fragments presents a selection of different series by Korean artist Jungho Jung that revolve around the element of water. Liquid, frozen or gas, the artist has captured images that transcend literal representation to reach the poetic. While French philosopher Gaston Bachelard stated that ‘more than any other element, water is a complete poetic reality’, some of Jung’s images could be perceived as haiku for Bachelard’s Water and Dreams, An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (1942) in which the waters are animated by the imagination of the philosopher-poet. Clear, deep, violent, cold, from the surface of water with its reflective narcissism to the very depths where water flows into death, Jung’s explorations have the poetical aspiration of fluid imagination.

Articulated around a triptych, The State of All Things, Fragments also suggests that Jung’s abstract visual explorations implicitly delve into Taoism, an oriental philosophy that emphasises living in harmony with the Tao. Translating as ‘way’, Tao denotes the natural order of things that is both the source of and the force behind every living element and object, as well as the entire universe. While the microscopic environment inside an ice cube contains the fragment of a wider universe, Jung is concerned with what exists between the interior and exterior. In this in-between space where the real infiltrates the imaginary, black and white resonate ad infinitum like two consistently opposing entities that could not, however, exist without one another. In this sense, the works Tension in Black, Black and White and White from Black seem to reference the Yin Yang, the concept of duality forming the whole, symbolising how seemingly contrary forces are actually complementary and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other as they interrelate.

From his wanderings into snowfields, around water dams and wonderings about his inner self, Jung’s introspective practice is concerned with the tension between the visible and invisible. Through his black and white visual abstractions, Fragments alludes to this intense silence where being and absence coalesce.