The Vaskjala Reservoir, built in 1970 as part of Tallinn’s water system and connected to Lake Ülemiste by canal, has shaped both the local ecosystem and how people relate to the landscape. During the late June residency at Copper Leg, when the days are long and the meadows full, artist Junny, Chun Au Yeung follows this layered landscape shaped by glacial movements and water systems, exploring how direction might be found not through fixed plans, but through attention, presence, and quiet observation.
” In 2022, after completing my Master’s degree in Estonia, I moved directly to a city in the UK. The decision felt somewhat abrupt, and in many ways, unchosen. I remember spending a long time before my arrival navigating the area through Google Maps—surveying streets, buildings, and environments. In this state of “pre-arrival orientation,” I began forming mental images of a place I had never physically entered, generating a tension between imagined stability and geographic positioning.
This experience became the starting point of my practice. A map seems to promise direction, offering a pathway to a place called “home”—an endpoint where anxiety might find rest. Yet, once I began living in this so-called destination, I felt only a deep sense of dislocation and despair. It was as if I were holding a map that failed to lead me to any space where I could actually belong. The destination had never truly existed—only the illusion of it.
This exhibition traces what I now describe as “an ongoing rehearsal within a labyrinth.” It reflects the gap between the imagined clarity of a destination and the dissonance of actual living. When symbols and shaded zones on a map can no longer guide us to where we hoped to arrive, we are left circling inside abstract signs—hovering in a state of unresolved, drifting, uncertain being. I became, in this process, an uninhabited shell—something moved, but not filled.
During my two-month residency at Copper Leg, I return to several recurring questions: What is the fiction of direction? What does it mean for existence to drift? And how much of belonging is shaped by chance? Does the idea of a “destination” truly exist, or is it merely a projection formed by perception?
As a response, I will develop a personal psychological map—one that connects reflections on the natural environment with lived experience. Through a pre-planned walking route, visitors will be invited into nearby forests and fields. How does a plant choose where to root itself? Do petals carry a will of their own, drifting not only with the wind, but toward where they wish to land? What does “destination” or “dwelling” mean to them? This act of walking becomes a quiet form of inquiry, and the reflections it generates will ripple into the language of the exhibition space—forming a dialogue between interior and exterior, between memory and presence.
Inside the gallery, through the rearrangement of familiar things into misaligned, non-functional forms, I aim to give shape to a quiet form of resistance—a question posed through composition: does existence itself have direction? These disruptions are not acts of destruction, but gestures of disorientation—revealing a state in which direction remains provisional, and the “ideal place” never truly settles. At the same time, I also use a pinhole camera to photograph the surrounding natural landscape, drawing on its inherent characteristics—waiting, inversion, uncertainty, and spatial misalignment—to further extend this reflection on the fragility of presence and the impossibility of arrival.“
– Junny about his work
Chun’s practice explores the instability of belonging through the material poetics of everyday objects, found materials, installation, drawing, and photography.
After receiving a Master’s degree in Contemporary Art from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2022, Chun relocated to the UK—a transition that sparked an ongoing reflection on displacement, direction, and the constructed nature of “home.” Their work asks whether belonging is a path that can be navigated, or a condition of continuous drift.
Through reconfigured furniture, dysfunctional assemblages, and fragile installations, CHUN constructs spatial-poetic situations where function collapses and orientation becomes uncertain. These material gestures embody a recurring philosophical tension: the longing for arrival, and the impossibility of ever fully arriving.
In recent work, the artist has expanded his exploration of the language of navigation—maps, symbols, and spatial cues—as metaphors for existential uncertainty. His current project, An Ongoing Rehearsal within the Labyrinth, unfolds as an ongoing meditation on the provisional nature of direction, questioning whether the “ideal place” is anything more than a construct of the imagination.
