CONTACT
Jungki Beak
기우제: 마하미드 Pray for Rain: Mhamid | 2008–18 | 4’40”
Courtesy the Artist
Courtesy the Artist
Synopsis
Pray for Rain: Mhamid (2008–2018) takes as its starting point the question raised by political ecologist Thomas Homer-Dixon: that water scarcity triggers human violence and conflict. Attentive to the spiritual and political aridity brought about by environmental deprivation, the artist assumes the role of a shaman and performs a rainmaking ritual in Mhamid, at the edge of the Sahara Desert in Morocco, seeking to suture these fractures.
The central material of this performance is vaseline, a substance the artist experienced firsthand as a child while treating burns, which operates within the work as a metaphor for healing, enveloping and mending the wounded earth and community. The artist fashions a lizard, long regarded in Korean folk belief as a mediator of rain, out of vaseline and wax, then melts it with fire, re-invoking the traditional “lizard-killing ritual” through contemporary materials and language. He then pours vaseline and wax into a triangular mold symbolizing the four elements of Western alchemy (water, fire, air, and earth), re-solidifies them, arranges the forms in the direction water flows, and buries them in the earth to complete the rite. Traversing Eastern and Western traditions of shamanism, this shamanic performance makes visible through sensory ritual the yearning to resolve historical conflict and restore moisture to the parched earth. The work further urges an imagination capable of healing relational and political wounds beyond the simple lack of “water,” and explores new possibilities of connection between the human and non-human, across regions and cultures.
About the artist
Since 2007, Jungki Beak has explored the relationship between humanity and nature by merging scientific experimentation, artistic creativity, and conventional superstition, driven by an abiding concern with questions of nature and healing. His work simultaneously addresses the physical properties and symbolic meanings of materials, focusing on capturing nature not as a mere object of representation but as an active agent. In particular, he constructs a distinctive world that captures nature's inherent presence through the mediation of fragments of reality itself. Beak has held solo exhibitions at Arario Gallery (2023), Space Willing N Dealing (2021), and OCI Museum of Art (2019), and has participated in group exhibitions at SeMA (2026), Daegu Art Museum (2024), ACC (2024), and MMCA, Korea (2014), among others.