“Overtone” is the title of Sojung Jun's first solo exhibition and her new three-channel video (2023). It is a musical terminology that describes the harmonic series that collide and blend around and above a fundamental note to create a coherent musical tone. The term is closely related to the “overtonal montage” coined by Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), a film director who left behind many studies on Soviet montage forms and experiments. Explaining overtonal montage using the principles of music, Eisenstein noted that primary artistic elements work together with various secondary components to create a dominant impression or unity. Therefore, he argued that overtonal montage not only evokes a consonant atmosphere or feeling but also elicits physical perception; it triggers a holistic experience, including emotional and physical reactions.1 Thus, Sojung Jun’s Overtone enables an immersive experience of multiple sensations through time and space as harmony is found within the dissonance between the instruments of Korea, China, and Japan.  

Probing into Sojung Jun’s ongoing investigation of ‘sound’, the artist launches syncope for the first time, an AR application developed especially for her first solo exhibition for Barakat Contemporary as an extension of the new film presented at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul for the Korea Artist Prize 2023. Featuring a new series of sculptures entitled Epiphyllum I (2023) and Epiphyllum III (2023) along with the new three-channel film Overtone, Jun proposes an interesting perspective that enables an organic web of relationship between sculptures, video, and digital data that transcends time and space, and the real and virtual.  

Amidst the rapidly changing pace of modern capitalism, there are still those who are creating a new world in their own ways. For instance, Sojung Jun has been asking, “Can video really shed light upon the invisible? Can it render the invisible visible or audible?” In this context, it was important for the artist to evoke all types of sensations besides the visual sensation. Through the newly presented three-channel video work, Overtone, she attempts to “trace ‘tangible/physical sound’ and ‘tone’ within the narratives and solidarity of Asian women by overlapping them with the speed of bodies, plants, language, and data that cross borders.2  

In preparation for the exhibition, Jun often spoke of the characters, Snow Woman and Princess Bari, who appear in Kim Hyesoon’s I Do Woman Animal Asia (2019)3. Princess Bari, a mythical woman who took it upon herself to guide the dead between this world and the afterlife, created an evolving and “ever-becoming” identity by constructing a visible world within an invisible world. Like the Snow Woman and Princess Bari who constantly alter and expand their identities, the artist seeks after sound to discover countless matters that abide in this world without hierarchy and unknown origins.  

 Jun’s new film, Overtone, revolves around the journey of Soon A Park, a gayageum player who has traveled across North and South Korea tracing sound. For the production of the new film, three composers from Korea, Germany, and Guatemala collaborated to compose three songs, with predetermined length and tempo each for gayageum, koto, and guzheng, which are performed in unison by KOTOHIME, the Korean-Chinese-Japanese zither ensemble. This long journey in which three composers and three performers connect and communicate in different places to create music captures the materiality of sound and tone that pass through the three countries under the large theme of “Crossing Borders,” which comes to an end with a video of their performance done in unison. The process is akin to experiencing harmonious counterpoint through sound.  

Composed of three main parts, Overtone begins with a solo performance by Nobuko, the Japanese koto player on the theme of “Melodies of Transit,” followed by the Korean North Korean gayageum player’s solo performance on the theme of “between” or “traveling.” Finally, the video ends with a solo performance by XIaoqing, the Chinese guzheng player performing on the theme of “wave.” In this sequence, the audience can appreciate the differences in techniques, tone, range, and sound between the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese qín (琴) instruments.4 Their performances were filmed using a long-shot camera technique.  

 In the second part, the three performers sit apart from each other in a triangular configuration and have in-depth conversations about the structure of each instrument, the tools they use, and their techniques to arrive at a “harmonic performance.” An interesting point in their conversation about the music to be performed is not only found in the differences between the three instruments, koto (13 strings), North Korean gayageum (21 strings), and guzheng (21 strings), but also the interaction between the performers as they share their concerns on improvising with the cultural elements of the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese musical traditions embedded into each song under the composer's   guidelines. For example, they include instructions such as “use the Korean nonghyeon (弄絃)5 technique,” which is not used for the Japanese instrument koto, or “play the North Korean gayageum (21 cash) with a pick in certain parts,” when it is not originally played with a pick. For playing the Chinese guzheng which has traditionally been played to make resonating sounds, they included instructions such as “use the muting technique commonly used with gayageum.” Through discussions like the above, the players practice the first, second, and third movements to slowly find harmony in the dissonance, incorporating experimental elements that reflect different musical elements. Moreover, Jun’s interest towards the appropriation of media is exposed especially in this part of the film.  

 What is particularly interesting about their conversation is the techniques and tools they use for their performances are different. The tone varies depending on multiple factors such as the materials and shapes of the pick, the angle of pressure on each string, whether one plays bare-handed, the thickness of the string, and the method of handling body weight and gravity onto the instruments; all of these factors demonstrate the materiality of sound. Communicating these differences, performers work together as an ensemble through a laborious process of fine-tuning and learning with each other. In a way, they operate in the decentralized “absence of perspective,” like the triangular composition created by the individuals captured in the camera in an over-the-shoulder shot - medium shot - sitting slightly offset from each other. The performers respond to each other with sound, embracing different musical perspectives and improvising with sound. As a result, the heterogeneous and fragmented discordant sounds extracted from different sound sources are fully exposed in the video shot. This montage technique by the artist “constructs a completely new ‘fragmentary whole’ that collides and interacts with each other, forming morphological and semantic changes from the transfer, transformation, and expansion of energy”6 and evokes in the audience not only an emotional and physical response but also a time of reflection created by the individual images.  

 In the last part of the video, a scene of improvisation over a long, slow period is shot through a super-telephoto lens. Jun uses close-up shots to not only capture the sounds but also the performers who pluck, rub, and press the strings, the friction between their hands and the strings that intermittently pause, as well as the sheet music and the hand that turns it, showing the materiality of the “instrument - hand” as an extension of the body and the physical properties of the instruments, evoking an intense sensory collision. In this sense, sound is not only an audiovisual experience but also one that accentuates the material senses, its vibration, and the movements of the bodies. Performers remain silent for some parts of the music, change the dynamic, add or omit things to make the other performer shine and create a sound that even they cannot predict from the given song, the creative substance. Perhaps the medium of heterogeneous and fragmented dissonant sound was captured through the camera lens, and the artist intended to follow the movement of the sound and lingering reverberation not even on the score and to reflect the different angles, shooting speeds, and breathing of each performer and the cinematographer. This is the moment when complete medium appropriation occurs via sound. Overtone, which unfolds in “long shot - medium shot - close-up shot,” brings a strong immersive experience toward the climax of the performance through gradual development in its filming techniques.  

 “In Japan, there is the word ‘AUM (阿吽): breath of beginning and end of all things,’ and I felt something like that. If we can create a world beyond borders within that breath, the next world… I felt something really profound like that, believing that could be possible. ”7 In its own way, Overtone creates a new world through sound.  

 In the intermission of the video Overtone, one can find a clasp between shots that is somewhat different from the previous chapter. This change is because, contrary to the slow, long-winded sounds of traditional instruments, the landscapes of modern cities and forests pass by at high speed while heterogeneous “human-plant 3D sculptures called Epiphyllum” appear overlapping in different spaces. At first glance, they all seem unrelated such as accelerated technological advancements and the resulting changes in human life, the movement of humans, plants, data, and sound. But they are the subjects of change and movement, whether voluntarily or not. The “human-plant sculpture” created by the artist is a being with an identity that is capable of transformation, making its body unrealistically large or extremely small. These virtual sculptures that can move quickly are seed data – image cuts that the artist planted in the AR application, Syncopy, as the data seed of the sculpture she created in a 3D virtual space.8 Sculptures in the real world with nomadic identities such as “movement,” “transformation,” and “transfiguration” allow anyone who downloads the Syncopy application to enlarge or reduce the size of the sculpture and place it with their fingers and bodies in their own space.  

This digital sculpture, which appears in the intermission’s moving image, breaks through the virtual space and stands floating on the first floor of the gallery. These are the two new sculptures, Epiphyllum I and Epiphyllum III9. Regarding these two works, Jun explains, “Syncopy, the application, and the sculptures pulsate data, something that is non-material to go against gravity and weight, and appear before our eyes as substances with a body in the real world.”  

Jun discovers the possibility of infinite space and time in an application with an interface system that extends beyond the boundaries of the traditional screen and enables the use of the most intuitive sensory system of humans, “eyes, hands, sound, and body,” for this experience. Her expanded creative realm starts from “thinking with the medium, questioning the body’s senses changed by it, and an interest in detecting the future in the midst of that discrepancy,” and arrives at “the void space contrasted with materiality in a pure white cube.” In other words, “Nonghyeon, as a lingering sound and gap that escapes the notation, or a sculpture that escapes into reality by amplifying material sound and the gap between physical space and virtuality, renders the existing way of looking at sculpture and the exhibition hall as a physical space powerless and invites the possibility of variation or derailment.”  

In this void space, the viewer becomes the mediator of sound and data, conjuring up holistic sensations, both emotional and physical. Sojung Jun's Overtone will be an exhibition where the audience hears, senses, and imagines the resonating sound, vibration, and tremor that wander in the disoriented empty space between sculptures and screens.