Blues and makgeolli: Jung Yeon-doo brews art from melancholy, fermentation

Installation view of Jung Yeon-doo's solo exhibition, "The Inevitable, Inacceptable," at Kukje Gallery Busan / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery

BUSAN — Inside a pristine white-cube gallery, a polyphonic harmony emerges from the most unlikely pairing: the soulful wail of blues music and the quiet rhythm of fermentation.

Drums beat in sync with the gentle fizz of “makgeolli,” Korea’s traditional rice wine. Sourdough rises to the slow sway of a saxophone’s sigh. And deep within “onggi” earthenware vessels, lights flicker in tune with the low hum of a contrabass.

The artist orchestrating this unexpected duet is Jung Yeon-doo, who is known for works that spotlight everyday people — restaging their memories, dreams and aspirations through carefully composed cinematic photographs and videos. His art becomes a space where disparate cultures, histories and personal narratives melt into something surprising yet whole.

That same fusion pulses through his latest solo exhibition, “The Inevitable, Inacceptable,” at Kukje Gallery Busan.

Artist Jung Yeon-doo / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery

So, why blues and makgeolli, of all things?

“If everything in the world simply died and decayed, how bleak would that be? But sometimes, instead of rotting away, things come back through fermentation, reborn as alcohol with a tangy aroma. That revival, that transformation into a new kind of joy, is deeply compelling,” Jung said with a smile at a recent press preview.

“And blues music — it’s often about hardship and sorrow in an unforgiving reality, but told with humor, without losing heart. That kind of resilience moved me. So I began to connect the two.”

In the artist’s eye, it is this sublimation of the harsh into the unexpectedly beautiful that links the music born from the toil of Black laborers in the 19th-century American South with the fermented beverage long cherished by Korea’s peasants and working class.

In this light, the photographs and videos on display — which may seem too disconnected at first glance — begin to fall into place, drawn together by a quiet, intuitive logic.

Installation view of Jung Yeon-doo's solo exhibition, "The Inevitable, Inacceptable," at Kukje Gallery Busan / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery

Jung Yeon-doo's "Portrait of Bacillus #5" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery

In resonance with the spirit of spontaneity that blues represents, Jung invited five musicians — on vocals, saxophone, organ, drums and contrabass — each based in a different corner of the world, from Seoul to Boston. He asked them to create their own variations, bound only by a shared tempo of 67 BPM, a 12-bar structure and certain chord progressions. The artist then wove their individual performances into a single composition, layering each part into a polyphonic, and at times deliberately asynchronous, symphony.

The resulting piece, “Inevitable Blues,” becomes a sonic counterpart to the earthly rhythms of fermentation within the gallery, embodied by makgeolli and “meju” (fermented soybean blocks).

As meju ferments, it is inoculated with the bacterium Bacillus, sometimes producing white, bubble-shaped clusters.

“To me, the whimsically crooked contours of these bubbles resembled faces,” Jung said, gesturing toward his photographic series, “Portrait of Bacillus.”

Jung Yeon-doo's batik "Inevitable Reasons #5" (2025) documents the stories of Koryoin descendants, using melted honeycomb on fabric tinted with natural herbs commonly found in traditional Korean medicine. Courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery

Also woven into this blues-bacteria symphony is a vocal line that tells the story of the Koryoin (also known as Koryo saram) — ethnic Koreans who, after Japan’s colonization of Korea (1910-45), settled in the Russian Far East, only to be forcibly relocated to Central Asia under Stalin in the 1930s. More than 170,000 were loaded onto cattle trains for the 6,000-kilometer journey and thousands perished along the way.

Today, it is the descendants of this displaced population, some of whom have returned to the homeland of their ancestors, who carry that legacy forward.

This glimpse into their lives, gently sung through a blues melody, strikes a poignant chord, echoing the experience of Black laborers in the U.S. — both shaped by dislocation, resilience and the enduring search for belonging.

“The Inevitable, Inacceptable” runs through July 20 at Kukje Gallery Busan.

This month, Jung will also bring two of his major photography projects — “Evergreen Tower” and “Bewitched” — to the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts. His solo presentation, titled “Building Dreams,” will open on Saturday, coinciding with the opening of the museum’s new Yu Kil-Chun Korean Art Gallery.