Taemen Jung Co-Habitat
Leipzig 1 Nov – 20 Dec 2025
Opening: 1 November 4 – 8 PM
While the world continues to heave itself into an ever-expanding digital era, our place in nature evolves, as nature continues to carve its place within ours. For centuries, the natural world has influenced human life by shaping cultures, providing resources, and guiding patterns of settlement. Yet, in the post-industrial age, our role is no longer to simply adapt to our environments; we actively construct, control, and often confine them. This evolving relationship can be traced through the spaces we inhabit, the ones we long for, and the ones we create in resistance to displacement. Much like a traveler in search of a new home or a potted houseplant moving across lands, space becomes a site of negotiation, between survival and growth, between belonging and detachment, between roots and routes.
This negotiation with the environment is one of survival. Plants bend toward light, stretch roots toward water, and alter their growth to suit the spaces they inhabit. Forests shift in composition after fire or flood, wetlands absorb excess water, and ecosystems reorganize to maintain balance. Even a single potted houseplant reflects this adaptability in how it responds to sunlight, humidity, and the boundaries of its container. To survive in a space is the overcoming of change and yet sometimes we have to fight for change to achieve space.
The struggle for space is a fight for environmental justice, for the rights to accessible housing and safe public spaces, and for the rights to cultivate growth and creativity. Jung’s work throughout her drawing series, “Price of Sunlight,” allows us a window (literally) into how space can be observed. With elements of visibility, privacy, and belonging all interacting on a windowsill, people—much like plants—live as victims to the greater systems in place that can result in inequalities which affect quality of life. Space acts, then, as a medium of survival, and the act of fighting for it affirms the value of life, identity, and connection across all living beings.
– Sandra Rushdy
Taemen Jung, born in 1988 in Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea, studied Sculpture at Hongik University in Seoul and at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) in the class for Installation and Space under Professor Joachim Blank. From 2021 to 2024, she was a master student (Meisterschülerin) of Professor Nevin Aladağ at the Dresden University of Fine Arts in the field of "Sculpture in Motion." The artist lives and works in Leipzig.
While the world continues to heave itself into an ever-expanding digital era, our place in nature evolves, as nature continues to carve its place within ours. For centuries, the natural world has influenced human life by shaping cultures, providing resources, and guiding patterns of settlement. Yet, in the post-industrial age, our role is no longer to simply adapt to our environments; we actively construct, control, and often confine them. This evolving relationship can be traced through the spaces we inhabit, the ones we long for, and the ones we create in resistance to displacement. Much like a traveler in search of a new home or a potted houseplant moving across lands, space becomes a site of negotiation, between survival and growth, between belonging and detachment, between roots and routes.
This negotiation with the environment is one of survival. Plants bend toward light, stretch roots toward water, and alter their growth to suit the spaces they inhabit. Forests shift in composition after fire or flood, wetlands absorb excess water, and ecosystems reorganize to maintain balance. Even a single potted houseplant reflects this adaptability in how it responds to sunlight, humidity, and the boundaries of its container. To survive in a space is the overcoming of change and yet sometimes we have to fight for change to achieve space.
The struggle for space is a fight for environmental justice, for the rights to accessible housing and safe public spaces, and for the rights to cultivate growth and creativity. Jung’s work throughout her drawing series, “Price of Sunlight,” allows us a window (literally) into how space can be observed. With elements of visibility, privacy, and belonging all interacting on a windowsill, people—much like plants—live as victims to the greater systems in place that can result in inequalities which affect quality of life. Space acts, then, as a medium of survival, and the act of fighting for it affirms the value of life, identity, and connection across all living beings.
– Sandra Rushdy
Taemen Jung, born in 1988 in Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea, studied Sculpture at Hongik University in Seoul and at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) in the class for Installation and Space under Professor Joachim Blank. From 2021 to 2024, she was a master student (Meisterschülerin) of Professor Nevin Aladağ at the Dresden University of Fine Arts in the field of "Sculpture in Motion." The artist lives and works in Leipzig.
Artists
- Taemen Jung