Eugene Jung

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

In 2011 the disaster scenes from childhood manga I read with a racing heart turned into actuality. The Fukushima nuclear disaster occurred while my brother was living in Japan. Seeing images of the massive tsunami on social media, I struggled to comprehend its reality. Being desensitized by comics, the danger he faced seemed unreal to me. The clash between gleefully industrialized, catastrophic imagery and actual disaster posed a formidable conflict in my perception, becoming the subject matter of my work. Within my sculptural practice, I wanted to bring cartoon scenes into real space. The images of destruction imprinted on my cells met reality and caused ontological discord. In my work, comic images and absurd imagination blatantly reveal their fakeness and crudeness. By not fully capturing the gravity of actual disasters, my works create a suspicious landscape. Believing that being grounded in reality would lead me through my turmoil, I started documentary works. Chernobyl Tour (2018) was my first documentary, capturing Chernobyl's reality and dark-tourism. In 2019, I visited Fukushima to create Pirated Future (2019), which examined the decade after the accident. However, my journey as a director was halted due to the Russia-Ukraine war, just as a planned follow-up shoot in Chernobyl was about to take place. After years of ongoing disasters, my beloved cartoon images began to be perceived as something objectionable. Now I asked myself: Can humor happen amidst despair?...

Artwork