In this paper, a high-performance optical gating in a junction device based on a vanadium dioxide dioxide ($VO_2$) thin film grown by a sol-gel method was experimentally demonstrated by directly illuminating the $VO_2$ film of the device with an infrared light at ~1554.6 nm. The threshold voltage of the fabricated device could be tuned by ~76.8 % at an illumination power of ~39.8 mW resulting in a tuning efficiency of ~1.930 %/mW, which was ~4.9 times as large as that obtained in the previous device fabricated using the $VO_2$ thin film deposited by a pulsed laser deposition method. The rising and falling times of the optical gating operation were measured as ~50 ms and ~200 ms, respectively, which were ~20 times as rapid as those obtained in the previous device.