Sooyeon Jeong is an architectural designer based in London and Seoul. Upon her graduation from the University of Westminster (BA), she has been exposed to historically and culturally diverse sites of various scales and programs in both academia and the field. She is keen to translate her everyday life observations into multidisciplinary practices such as drawing, writing and making. Throughout her studies at Royal College of Art, she learnt the process of transforming the observational power into spatial qualities by exploring various methods of visualisation, material experimentation and structural understanding. She may be poised in the future to make better attempts, not only in distilling the narratives but in other endeavours as well throughout her enthusiastic challenges.
Sooyeon Jeong
Single middle aged women migrating to farming is no longer a fad but a social phenomenon in Korea. People who feel irritated by the social structure that pursues the existing success decided a migration, where they can flexibly adjust their working hours instead of living a set schedule and enjoy the quality of life for their health in nature. Soon as they migrate with such inflated dreams, women encounter different experiences. In a male- dominated agricultural society, women’s lives are disempowered and excluded from accessing or making decisions about agricultural production. While they are constantly exposed to rude and unpleasant gazes and behaviours that can also be interpreted as an aspect of misogyny, it is difficult to find spaces and people who can speak their language. Despite long-held social unwritten rules, WWWs, an abbreviation of ‘Women ready to live Whenever Wherever’ composed of six women in their 20s and 30s in Korea, has been evolving a new form in living and working by using agricultural land as their home.
The society is a gathering of women who have only lived in rural areas, or women who have migrated to farming, or women who plan to migrate someday. This is a group that started to find out the commonality of single women living in rural areas and to clarify the relationship between rural areas and women. This meeting begun with the women who happened to live in the same rural area by chance and met to talk about the inconveniences of rural life, then planned an exhibition, and now the scale has grown up and has increased by around 200 people. Each group composed of around 10 people and scattered all around the country.
The project ‘The Green Edge’ first looks into how this new society refuses pre-defined and role-defined space to acquire a different lifestyle. Secondly, how a collective space could carve out a different quality of life for these women with a special casting technique. This is by exploring how various courtyards with different light quality challenges the blurred condition placing between the housing and the farming area as the new strategy to let for these women society conduct their lives which is already happened.
Most of them lived their lives in a Korean traditional house Hanok, which had very strict, gender-divided space, but now it’s been transformed into a highly collective space, with meeting room, space for cooking together, to enjoy leisure activities together and a space for child care, where they could look after children collectively. Pre-defined and role-defined space that hanok previously had has already been refused by this society.
Madang, meaning the courtyard, has integrated an example of role-defined space. This area is where both productive and reproductive labour are happening at the same time. Productive labour includes their daily tool maintenance or peeling the harvested rice. Whilst reproductive labour signifies the process of food drying and having children playing while women doing their own hobbies more related to housework at the same time. This space, its in between female sphere and male’s sphere which is very blurred condition. Under this blurred condition, people put portable wooden tables in the shade under the eaves or outside in the sunlight to have autonomy in their actions.
The current site, changwon, is located eastern of South Korea. A valley where it is difficult to access, with the entrance to the village along a long highway so there is only one entrance to the site. It is surrounded by high contour of the mountain. There are fields on the southern side and houses on the northern side. Across the river is a rice field. So, through experimenting new types of space. I propose, a blurred statement of ownership, where the houses and roads are kept as fixed elements, but challenging various courtyards with different light qualities and encouraging the practice of sharing domesticities in the courtyard as a new strategy to let these women to conduct their lives in the site. Not just simple shade made by eaves of the roof but made by different openings in the space with different heights and depths. The inspiration for this design is that the current Madang is usually rectangular in shape as it is closed by fence and hanok house. However this site located in the middle of the mountain, I wanted it to be blended into the mountains and curved roof line that feels like a flowing mountain range.
These spaces are made with a certain casting method using latex, which has strong copying ability. I made imprints of tree or wood surfaces with thin layers of natural latex. Peeling off the latex, leaving the tree “untouched” while a cast against this wood-skin mold “recaptures”. As we encounter the cast, we can still experience the reality of the nature through its texture and form, even though the tree isn’t there directly. However for me, It was more challenging to build up the wall as thin as possible as wishing people to be as close as possible to the smell, sound, and action of the surrounding nature. So I tried to spray the compound with a spray gun, and it casted very evenly and thinly. And also, as it casted thinly, the cracks occur along the pattern on the copied latex caused by wind, climate and small impacts over time reveal its roughness attached to the nature directly.
The different heights and depths of the wall determine where the shadows fall, and at this site, on average in summer when the wall is 1m, the shade falls 0.6m north of the wall and 0.8m west and 1.4m west and 2.1m west when the wall is 2m. In winter, its length is approximately 2.1 times that of summer. Through this, where and how high the wall should be installed and where the shadows will fall. For example, there is an existing outdoor local lily flower garden here, but it was given 0.8m because the shade on the wall should not block the sunlight and a height of 3.8m was given to make a space where you could rest in the shade while working in the field just next to it.
