On JungEun Kim’s Maps, Movement, and Circles 

Heeseung Choi

Maps: From Lost Map (2010) to the Self Mapping Series (2016–Present)

Since beginning her practice in earnest around 2010, JungEun Kim has consistently used the map—a condensed body of data, a flattened image, and a form of practical information created by people—as a primary artistic language. Drawing on the diverse forms of maps, their methods of data collection, functions, and modes of production, the artist approaches a wide range of subjects, revealing multiple layers of context, from personal routes of movement to redevelopment sites and symbolic locations associated with social events such as the Sewol ferry disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2024 South Korean martial law crisis. In short, for roughly fifteen years, JungEun Kim has centered her practice on the idea of the map, recording both the personal routines that unfold day by day and the social issues encountered throughout life, regardless of individual intention. What began with old paper maps has naturally evolved over time to incorporate technological developments and new formats, including digital mapping platforms such as Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, as well as other forms of digital cartography.

If we look at the dictionary definition of a map, it is described as geographic information that represents the three-dimensional Earth on a two-dimensional surface through the use of lines, colors, and symbols. This prompts us to consider why the map has remained the artist’s language for so many years. A brief overview of the forms that have appeared throughout the artist’s practice reveals a consistent engagement with mapping. Early works involved carving away everything but the roads from an atlas to expose the network connecting a city. Later, the artist traced buildings and routes onto translucent paper in pencil, layering and mounting them onto glass panels to create floating island-like forms. In another work, the colors of the sky observed over seven days while moving through a particular area were presented as a chromatic map resembling a color chart. In 2016, yellow bands of color extracted from repeated journeys to and from the Sewol Ferry Memorial altar at Gwanghwamun began to appear. At the same time, the artist developed works that connected highly personal points of departure and destination, using those routes as blueprints for black three-dimensional structures. It was during this period that JungEun Kim introduced the title Self Mapping for a series that came to embody her distinctive cartographic language.

From a broader perspective, this shift may be understood as a move away from reinterpreting existing maps toward what might be called “mapping.” This transition also appears closely tied to the question of destination, or the absence of one. In the early works, JungEun Kim used maps as a medium through which to speak about having nowhere to go—a state of wandering and drifting in the absence of a destination. At that time, the orderly arrangement of data occupying its place on a flattened surface seems to have provided the basis for the artist’s repetitive acts of cutting, folding, and reassembling. The roads, buildings, plots of land, and plains rendered geometrically on a map are forms of information stripped of countless narratives. In that sense, they are also the detached results of a system that enables phenomena to be viewed with apparent neutrality. Drawing upon this quality, the artist dismantled maps, recombined them, affixed them to walls, and reconstructed them as three-dimensional forms, as though seeking to ease the difficulty of wandering without a destination. In doing so, they ultimately encouraged viewers to reflect on what had been erased from the map and what had remained hidden beyond its surface.

It appears that the artist’s personal experiences of marriage and parenthood later influenced the direction of the work. In particular, one can observe a more defined position regarding the presence or absence of destinations. While routes on the map remain constrained, they are no longer empty; they now lead to destinations that clearly exist. The artist also becomes more willing to select subjective elements from a map and relate them to personal circumstances. For example, there emerges space for emotion to enter objective data, whether through the changing colors of the sky observed each day, colors noticed in Gwanghwamun Square, or hues collected while moving through the city by day and night. Eventually, the artist arrives at a process in which destinations are marked as circular points and connected by lines to create a kind of blueprint. These diagrams are then cast and painted, as though filling in a solid core that had not previously existed. In these works, which reveal the relationship between what has been erased and what remains as a black form, the artist inscribes dotted lines and numbers at each destination, preserving a minimal set of cartographic information. More than several dozen of these sculptural maps have been produced to date. They are sized to be gathered together in large numbers, displayed, or even held in the hand. From the absence of destinations to maps that exist as tangible physical masses, the many routes that appear and disappear throughout life have accumulated and remained within JungEun Kim’s maps.

In summary, what repeatedly draws the artist to maps is their ability to express and connect, through the simplest and clearest of languages, the routes that serve as both origin and destination in daily life, along with the countless things encountered in the spaces between one movement and the next. Forms emerge when only what is essential remains amid an excess of information. Only then can information be read again directly and clearly. At times, issues that cast their shadows across individual lives, such as redevelopment, housing, and urbanization, naturally come into view. JungEun Kim’s maps may therefore be understood as the outcome of private emotions and memories, as well as decisions about what to remove and what to preserve. And throughout the transition from objective maps to subjective mapping, the concept of the route remains constant, continuing to anchor the work.

Circles and Movement

 As the artist once remarked, “My world is formed when small dots on a map come together to become a larger dot.” This suggests that the small marks left on newly created maps, and the way they gradually accumulate into overlapping circular forms, have been an important aspect of JungEun Kim’s practice. For the artist, circles on a map function much as they do for many people: they indicate—or spot—locations and destinations, marking places that carry significance, whether great or small. At the same time, the artist’s circles seem to convey a sense of modest possession. One is reminded of a traveler who pins a large world map to a wall and marks visited destinations with stickers or small flags, watching the numbers gradually grow. The artist’s own reflections suggest a similar impulse. The reason this sense of possession might be described as “modest” is that, unlike world travel, which often requires considerable time, expense, and determination, JungEun Kim’s act of placing circles is tied more closely to the routines of everyday life, commuting, and chance encounters.

What deserves attention are the small events that occur between one point and another, in the spaces that connect one circle to the next. Specific events, narratives, emotions, and interpretations do not appear directly in the finished works, yet JungEun Kim continues to mark the world with points in an almost methodical manner, fully aware that these small dots accumulate over time. As someone who has observed each passing day, as a witness to things that may have seemed insignificant yet undeniably existed, the artist continues this act of marking. For this reason, the circles carry movement, even if that movement is slow and simple. They are circles acquired through actual journeys from one place to another. They are not passive marks placed upon a map, but traces of effort—small acts of agency gained and claimed through movement. At the same time, they become records of daily history and memory, gradually gathering into larger points. In other words, if the circles that appear throughout the artist’s practice symbolize the visible outcomes presented on the map, movement can be understood as representing the journeys and processes that lead to them. To imbue a circle with movement is to metaphorically reveal that its origins lie beyond the circle as a mere geometric form.

A notable aspect of JungEun Kim’s recent solo exhibition Spin–Spot (2025) at CR Collective is the way movement, a recurring element throughout the artist’s practice, takes on a different form. Although the artist’s central concerns remained the same—including data gathered while exploring the Gwanghwamun area from Dongsipjagak Pavilion in 2024, the movement of motor-driven circles, and selective mappings based on personal experience—this exhibition introduced large blue steel sculptures made from curved pipes that extended throughout the gallery. The approximately ten sculptures are all variations on forms such as gates, barricades, revolving doors, and fences. By placing these structures—which either restrict or direct human movement—throughout the exhibition space, the artist introduces movement not only through the sculptures themselves but also through the circulation patterns they generate. As these different metaphors of movement overlap, one is prompted to consider whether the contrast between the light, continuous motion of the motor-driven circles and the heavy presence of the steel sculptures reflects the weight of the social issues that have long occupied the artist’s practice.

The rhythmic sense of movement that has long emerged through circles, together with the artist’s preference for refined and carefully resolved forms, has often invited interpretations of JungEun Kim’s work through the lens of design. This may stem from a process that shares certain affinities with design itself: condensing large amounts of information and translating them into images. The visual economy of the work has also tended to reinforce a sense of lightness and fluidity. The materials the artist has consistently chosen—tracing paper, acrylic, transparent film, and rigid urethane—all possess qualities that avoid excessive weight. For this reason, the steel sculptures presented in the recent solo exhibition may represent a significant shift, and one that warrants further attention. Perhaps they reflect an additional layer of interpretation shaped by the 2024 South Korean martial law crisis. If so, new questions emerge: How might the artist address narratives that extend beyond the individual in future work? Will those concerns continue to remain part of the practice?

The maps of JungEun Kim that we have examined through the lenses of circles and movement ultimately speak with candor: this is the geography of the world as I have seen and experienced it. Without stating so directly, they tell us of time spent in cities on the verge of disappearance, of driving along the urban periphery, and of walking through the centers of some of the most charged events in recent history. Viewed from a broader perspective, these experiences may represent only fragments—partial views seen through circular openings cut from a much larger whole. Yet the artist continues to identify the most viable route toward each day’s destination, accumulating the act of following it. In order to give form to these continually changing personal experiences, JungEun Kim has expanded the practice into sculpture and installation, experimenting with diverse forms of data mapping as well as AI technologies. It is impossible to predict exactly how complex these maps may become, or what new events and encounters life may place along their path. What remains certain, however, is that the blue circles on the artist’s world map continue to multiply, day after day.

 Gemini Kim’s Reflective Run

Yuki Konno

1.   

Looking back on the history of running, one might invoke the ideas of escape and flight. When faced with urgency, humans run. While jogging differs in that it is motivated not by an immediate crisis but by a future-oriented concern for one’s well-being, it could be said that “jogging” and “fleeing” ultimately arise from the same impulse. Both share a common purpose—they serve as a kind of warm-up for a better life. Running is a force that moves across places rather than remaining in one. This is not merely a matter of physical location. Running does not begin as running—it is a state sustained by gradually increasing speed from the act of walking. In that sense, running cannot be maintained for as long as walking. When Gemini Kim runs through factories built during the modern era, including those that now remain only as ruins, their figure seems to overlap with the figures of those who once worked there, appearing almost ghostlike. Now that the time of operating and sustaining these factories has passed, these sites, reduced to their shells, have been left abandoned or preserved as objects of contemplation. Those who once “ran” in order to make a living within these factories have long since departed. Yet factories are not the only things that appear in Gemini Kim’s recordings of running. In Daenong Factory Run (2024), scenes of the artist running through factory districts are interwoven with archival materials they have gathered, accompanied by explanatory subtitles. In the video, the artist’s running sustains a momentary sharpening of the resolution of scenes that portray the past. The work foregrounds an encounter between the present and the past, as the artist’s breathing intertwines with images of quiet, sparsely populated neighborhoods. 

2.   

Before understanding walking as a form of mental leisure, it is worth revisiting the concept of the urban stroller, or flâneur, associated with the poet Charles Baudelaire. According to Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire was not a leisurely wanderer but a vigilant observer . From this perspective, walking is not an expression of ease within the modern metropolis, but an act charged with tension, undertaken as a means of self-preservation. This is precisely where walking and running curiously overlap. When walking functions as a defensive response to the outside world, it resembles the urgency of flight, compelling one to remain grounded in oneself while continually moving elsewhere. In Walking Through Fukushima: Through the Eyes of the Diaspora (2012)  by Suh Kyungsik, walking is far from a leisurely pursuit. In this book, walking becomes a resonance of exile shared between the author’s diasporic identity as a Korean born and raised in Japan and those who were forced to evacuate in the aftermath of the nuclear accident that triggered a national disaster. The sense of being unable to belong cultivates a sensibility of running, whether in the metropolis or within the factory. Running persists when one is driven by external forces yet must continue carrying forward one’s own will in order to survive. 

3.   

What, then, is factory running—the act of keeping a factory in motion? Just as running is oriented toward the future health of the body, factory operation looks toward improvement and development, building the foundations—that is, the infrastructure—upon which modern life depends. The people who keep factories running—established to revitalize local communities and support the national economy—are workers. They run breathlessly in service of production, regardless of ownership or personal possession. On assembly lines, without knowing what part of the whole their labor may ultimately become, they continue their work in silence. In an environment where one feels placed within a vast machine one can scarcely comprehend, and where one does not even know what demands one’s labor is answering , Gemini Kim’s “factory running” seeks to recover the worker’s breath—a moment in which one can remain with oneself. Even from the scenes recorded in the video, it is impossible to know exactly how these now-ruined sites once operated. The perspective offered is at once that of those who live around the factories and that of a curious visitor passing through. When we look at factory districts, whether abandoned as ruins or still standing, what we can most readily grasp is their scale. The scale of a factory is usually perceived through external signs—towering walls, the sound of machinery, and the like. But how often do we imagine the people who were constantly moving to sustain that scale from within? More than that, do we ever stop to think about those who once worked there?

4.   

Gemini Kim speaks not only about the constrained lives of the workers who once labored here, but also about the will to recover one’s own breath, to remain with oneself, and thereby break free from forms of oppression. In factories, where workers are expected to fulfill their roles while suppressing their individuality, Gemini Kim’s running reclaims freedom from external constraints, performing a gesture of liberation. Their work does more than invite us to imagine the lives of factory workers in the past. “Factory running” suggests the possibility of belonging to oneself even while being bound to the factory, of finding a sense of belonging through oneself rather than through the institution. Put differently, it conveys the possibility of escape. In this sense, the work recalls what Eric Hoffer paradoxically suggested from his experience as a dockworker: “To be bound to oneself, even to one’s own happiness, is unhealthy .” It also resonates with Erich Fromm’s argument that, after being released from traditional forms of social solidarity, individuals in capitalist society become isolated . Against this condition, Gemini Kim’s work suggests that people retain the freedom to run, the freedom to break away. Through the ideas of Hoffer and Fromm, one is reminded of Sandro Mezzadra’s analysis, which locates in workers the potential for fundamental transformation. Mezzadra finds the seeds of political struggle in forms of labor that are multinational, mobile, and provisionally assembled . Running is an act through which movement itself becomes a force within the body. The sense of fullness that arises from the bodily awareness that one generates the force circulating within oneself becomes a force directed outward, a force that carries one elsewhere. Factory running depends upon the oppressive forms of running demanded of workers. Yet workers, while compelled to follow the roles assigned to them within the factory, are also—and always have been—capable of performing another kind of running: a running that escapes those very constraints. 

5.   

If running offers the displaced and the factory worker an opportunity to recover the self, then the factory becomes a site where the direction of forces toward development and progress is drawn. Drawing on the notion of the ligne de fuite, or “line of flight,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization, introduced in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), is described by Gary Genosko as having both positive and negative effects in lived reality . Factory running, or factory operation, is at once transversal and disciplinary. In Right to Escape (2006), Sandro Mezzadra discusses migrant labor alongside forced labor and deportation in colonial contexts, examining the relationship between workers’ mobility and systems of control . In this sense, the factory is a site marked by dualities—operation and oppression, development and regulation. Through “factory running” Gemini Kim brings attention to the histories embedded in factories. Factory running, that is, the histories of establishment and operation, is often overlooked despite its entanglement with histories of colonization and frontier expansion, receiving far less attention than war memorial sites or major social events. Few people, for example, know the history of a rayon factory that moved from Saga Prefecture, Japan, to Namyangju, Korea, and then to Dandong, China, as explored in Rayon Factory Run (2023), or the history of Yongsan Industrial Complex (2022), which examines an industrial district that existed during the 1970s . If there is a reason Gemini Kim runs through factories that once functioned as strongholds of colonial industry or engines of postwar national development, it is not only to uncover the lives of workers embedded in those sites. It is also to make visible, from the perspective of the present, the movements, transformations, rises, and declines that have unfolded between past and present, and between urban centers and their peripheries, often extending to distant places beyond them. 

6.   

This, in turn, points toward another sensibility available to those living in the modern city. “The pleasure that comes from running today can only be enjoyed when moving through a developed city without much thought.” This confessional subtitle appears as the artist’s concluding remark in Rayon Factory Run spoken while reflecting on the lives of the workers who once labored in the now-abandoned factory. Factories, as infrastructure, have become so familiar that they permeate our lives even as their identities remain largely unknown to us. In this sense, the feeling described by Simone Weil is shared not only by factory workers but also by those who live beyond the factory gates. The sensation of “being placed within a vast machine I cannot fully understand” belongs not only to the fragmented experience of factory labor but also to the lived experience of people residing in factory districts. We may not know exactly what it is, yet there remains an overwhelming presence that sustains the community. As time passes, Gemini Kim runs through former factory sites, layering pain and pleasure onto the act of running. The pressure to maintain speed echoes the demands of an assembly line, yet the artist’s concentrated running transforms a sense of estrangement from oneself into a voluntary gesture of flight. Reflective running is not easily visible in everyday life. As the video unfolds, “thoughtless movement” becomes filled with thought. If the routines of public transit, walking, and jogging make it difficult for us to think about history, then perhaps, like Gemini Kim, we must run through it step by step, one site at a time.

Beyond the Skin

 Mijung Kim

I. Between Your Bones

Woong Yong Kim

“A nothing in relation to the infinite, a whole in relation to nothingness, a midpoint between nothing and everything, infinitely removed from grasping either extreme. The ends of things and their origins remain hidden from him within an impenetrable mystery.”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Léon Brunschvicg, fragment 72. 

1

There is a blue porcelain cup with a broken base. No longer able to hold water or coffee, it has lost its practical function and become, to some, little more than a useless object taking up space. Yet they did not keep the cup simply because it seemed wasteful to throw away. It was inexpensive and of a common design. More importantly, many years ago, during a difficult period in their life, it had been given to them, filled with coffee, by a friend who was going through hardships of their own. The friend had said something they never fully understood: that they had placed their own flaw within the cup. That friend died, and when the cup broke, memories of their first meeting came rushing back, along with the warmth of that moment, its quiet simplicity, the aroma of coffee, and the sensation lingering at their fingertips—a world at once joyful and fleeting. The broken cup was no longer merely a vessel for drinking tea; it had become a part of the friend. When they blew air through the opening in the cup, a sound resonated as though the friend were answering.

2

Far from the surface, it is only when the cup can no longer fulfill its prescribed function that one reaches the edge of this world and stands at the threshold of another, deeper world just beginning to emerge. The vast inner world rarely reveals itself without a particular catalyst. For this reason, our glimpses of the flow between ending and origin, between the worlds of surface and interior, depend upon an appropriate medium, much as we cannot see our own backs with the naked eye and must instead rely on a mirror. Even then, we can perceive only a faint and indistinct image of what lies beyond this world. Even if we manage to catch sight of our backs, we cannot fully recover the form of that neglected moment as it once was. We long to look directly at that form, yet it always turns away.

3

There is a dried flower in a blue porcelain pot. Its colors have faded, and on yellowing leaves, visited no longer by butterflies but by flies, decay slowly sets in amid nutrients that are at once fresh and strangely fitting. At that moment, a voice seems to linger among the roots stretching beneath the surface: “Perhaps what binds us together is not the convincingly constructed image presented on a smooth surface, but the wounds left within it—joined to other wounds, pain to pain, weakness to weakness.” The voice slips through the crack in the broken porcelain pot and burrows into some part of their body. Then it emerges once again from their mouth: “If a strange voice from the past suddenly enters the present and wanders among the bones searching for its place, can we really say it is meaningless simply because we cannot understand its abrupt arrival?” Before they can tell where the questions carried by that voice begin or end, they hatch and awaken within the body, living on as actors in a film.

4

In the film, an actor cast in an inconspicuous role wanders. “Why do you try to become something else when you are already a world unto yourself?” Fragments of information drifting around then accumulate within their dreams, unsettling their convictions. As the scene changes, the actor collapses to the ground. “I believe that small miracles are happening all around us.” They struggle forward in search of their place, crawling step by step across the split back of the past, over the ruins of a house of cards, through the interior of an expression from which words have vanished, across the emptiness left behind by departure, between words sealed away in a drawer, and over the waters of a dim dawn. Though they can no longer make a sound, they still exist within the history of this film as a world of their own, and they will live again.

5

Why must the voices of this world—from within one another, from between bone and bone—continue to alienate one another endlessly even as they long so desperately for something? What lies concealed behind words, the broken cup, the flower, the wind, the miracle, the sun, opens its mouth. They set out in search of these hidden things. A force vibrates between then and now, between the object and the self, between the spine and the skull. The force that binds us, rising upon our bones, is not merely flesh composed of proteins and nerves.

Ⅱ. Beneath Closed Eyes

Mijung Kim

Light

When told, “Look toward the light, ” one turns in anticipation of finding something there, yet regrettably it offers little clue as to what that something might be. The same is true of a voice that is heard, or one that seems to be approaching. Even the temporal distance, point of view, and scene toward which the voice is directed all feel different. In the end, it becomes impossible to determine exactly whose voice it is, or what or where it is speaking of. Voices from different eras intersect around a single photograph documenting a past event (Wake, 2019). Messages that seem to arrive from the far reaches of memory are read aloud without end (Into the 206 Bones, 2025). Past and present narratives resonate around places that are disappearing, have been lost, or are yet to be lost (Gray Matter, 2023). Ultimately, for these narratives to reach the body, the eyes must first be closed.

Once again—look toward the light.

Sleep

“A sound heard long ago, and yet I heard it as the same sound... that tinkling was always there within me, and between it and the present moment there lay all that infinitely overspread past which I did not know I was carrying within myself.”

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust 

Historical events serve as a catalyst for the artist’s work, yet the way those events unfold within the work is not tied to clear explanations grounded in archival materials or documentary evidence. Even when such materials are used, the artist avoids treating them as definitive proof or as direct clues to the event itself. As a result, the histories and stories that emerge in the work gradually drift away from the narratives that have been publicly recorded, evaluated, and accepted. Rather than foregrounding the contentious aspects of an event, the work follows the smaller, more intimate questions raised by the “strange voices” that were entangled within it yet remained obscured, unsettling histories that once appeared complete. The way these voices emerge, and the way the artist speaks of history, can seem to move back and forth between sleep and dream. Realized only after the eyes are closed, dreams reflect past and present simultaneously, generate images, and leave vivid sensations lingering in the body even after waking. Dreams wander between illusion and reality, between language and what lies beyond language. Even so, the people that appear in the works begin to tell their stories only after closing their eyes.

 In Wavelength (2021), a man lies down. His eyes are closed. In Gray Matter, a man lies down. His eyes are closed. He recalls the death of his grandfather. The man in Gray Matter, who says, “When I fall asleep, things that have disappeared come back to me,” repeatedly closes his eyes as he speaks of his grandfather, the dog he once raised, and his home. These are things that no longer exist. Again, in Wavelength, the man is asleep. He forces his eyes open, trying not to fall asleep, or perhaps trying not to return to a particular moment, but in the end his eyes close. Something thick and sticky pours over his face and hands. Unable, or unwilling, to open his eyes, he remains bound by the media  that cling to his body, carrying and dispersing records and memories. In Wake, too, the only moment in which the figures are together is when they lie side by side with their eyes closed, as if under hypnosis. Voices that had been erased or diminished are summoned with clarity only after the eyes are closed. Memories that have accumulated in different forms flash briefly across consciousness, repeatedly reaching toward the body in the present. In this way, beneath closed eyes, sleep, hypnosis, and death run parallel to one another, becoming points of departure through which connections can be made. There already exist polished languages that define the relationships between “that day” and those bound to it, whether the Gwangju Uprising, the Yonsei University Incident, the Mok-dong anti-eviction struggle, or the experiences of migrant workers. Yet the words buried deep within the body can emerge only when one refuses to trust solely what has already been articulated. This is powerfully borne out by the artist’s own experience: the sudden sting of tear gas encountered while visiting their mother at Severance Hospital as a child, and the dissonance between the songs of dreams and love taught at school and the reality they came to know. When confronted with records of an event and their material traces—beer bottles and Molotov cocktails, fireworks and camera flashes, or fragmented scenes repeatedly replayed through the media—one is suddenly struck by the collision between the shape of the world one knows today and something altogether different. The documentation of an event may be complete, yet beneath the closed eyes of those who continue to recognize and endure the cycle of that violent time, every scene spins endlessly like a Möbius strip. Once again, a voice is heard: “Can I open my eyes now?”

Voice

In Wavelength, a man is asleep, yet the voice presumed to be narrating his dream belongs to a woman. For this reason, voice in the artist’s work does not function as a guide that faithfully explains a given situation. Instead, these voices overlap, interfere with one another, and attempt multiple layers of speech. They often act as though they are holding objects that are not actually there, while sounds are played in sync with their gestures. Though neither the appearance nor the voice truly belongs to a man or woman, they stand before us with complete composure, as if possessed by another presence.

 Gray Matter begins with a voice that feels distinctly out of place. An appeal written by a representative of displaced residents during the 1986 Mok-dong anti-eviction struggle, a text expressing the anguish of losing one’s home, is read aloud in the voice of a Filipino migrant worker. From the moment the text is delivered slowly and haltingly in uncertain Korean pronunciation, it becomes clear that the original owner of those words is not present.

 The artist was born in this neighborhood, yet no longer calls it home after everything they once knew there disappeared. Instead, he turns to conversations about home and belonging with Filipino migrant workers he met at a migrant support center established on the site of what once stood there. Their voices, reflecting on and dreaming of family deaths and the homes of their hometowns, become entangled with one another. “I dreamed about the bamboo house where we used to live, the one that was swept away by the river...” “My skin turned into fish scales...” “My uncle will find me and eat me.” / “Then will you become your uncle?” / “No, I’ll live inside his body.” It is significant that this strange exchange, unfolding in a context seemingly unrelated to an earlier account of gathering the remaining materials after a bamboo house collapsed in a flood, arrives at the idea of “living inside.” Not becoming, but living within. This contradictory condition generates a complex web of relations, at times overlapping and at times diverging, between the historical experience of forced eviction during redevelopment in the 1980s and the question of home and belonging for migrant workers living in Korean society today. In Gray Matter, voices reading the appeal and recalling home join together fractured trajectories tied to a particular place. Meanwhile, the “strange voices” in Wake and Wavelength drift through space, continually colliding with images. 

 Particularly in Wake, the voices drift among photographs, screens, and light (or fire), moving through coughing, hypnosis, and bodies stretched thin as skin, against the backdrop of a series of events that unfolded in 1996. The differing situations and positions occupied by these voices deflect any attempt to interpret the events in a singular or partial way. In doing so, they fragment the images of official history and construct layered strata of memory. Moving between bodies and speaking through one another, these voices reveal obscured points within the events while simultaneously slipping away from any fixed meaning. This recalls the uncanny collisions generated by temporal disjunctions in the artist’s earlier works, Night and Fog (2018) and Avoided Names Under the Hard Skin (2014), where voices from films of the past are made to inhabit bodies in the present. In Avoided Names Under the Hard Skin, the voices of ghosts from 1970s films are overlaid onto the bodies of performers. The audience watches the performers repeatedly deliver borrowed voices while continually shifting their gaze between the screen and the two stages that remain before them. Although everything unfolds in real time, only the camera’s selective gaze is transmitted to the screen. The audience knows that every scene is taking place simultaneously within the same time and space, directly before their eyes. Yet as bodies and narratives from fundamentally different dimensions press against one another and reflect one another, the narrative is delayed and destabilized. Any mode of speech organized through linear time is thoroughly ruptured. At the same time, the transferred voice passes through the body in search of words that still remain, unsettling the continuity of time alongside fragments of events that were left unspoken in their own moment. This is why, even when the woman at the end of Wake looks directly at the audience and says, “Now I truly believe it,” everything nevertheless feels as though it has returned to its point of origin once again.

 Beyond the superimposed voice, another voice that left a strong impression appears in Gray Matter. As Filipino migrant workers spend time together in lively conversation, someone begins singing a Korean ballad at the top of their voice. Though the song resonates through the microphone, mournful, impassioned, and long having faded from popular memory, it is drowned out by the surrounding chatter. A sense of unease emerges as the familiar language and song seem unable to find their place within that setting, and the voice is eventually pushed to the margins. Unheard by anyone, it gradually fades away. But was that song truly nothing at all? The artist’s decision to include the lyrics as English subtitles may itself be an answer to that question. 

Again,

I listened to Into the 206 Bones in a dimly lit studio. As in Wake, lights accompanied by objects moved like theatrical lighting, though this time they surrounded a performer rather than appearing on a screen. Yet I found myself wanting to close my eyes. The music and narration, whose references I did not recognize, remained at once distant and strangely close, like a dream. Even so, traces of light seeped through my eyelids, and the performer’s voice prompted me to imagine things I had forgotten or never known. Among them was a vivid story about a grandfather. Then, suddenly, the final line, “I never met him while he was alive,” brought me back to reality. I think of the countless images that have always been beside me, though I had never seen them before remembering them. I recall the artist’s response to questions about history: memory’s wavelengths, action and reaction, and the paradox of the “memory-image,” concealed and circulated, yet continually remade between record and memory. And I think of those who have not returned, suspended between memories, records, and images so deeply embedded in the body that they cannot be shaken off, each pushing against the others across time. Is there truly a place in this vast world for those voices? 

“Shaping the World”

Soyeon Ahn

* Siha Kim’s recent work Earth Theater (2025) resembles, as its title suggests, a scene from a stage production. Or perhaps it is better described as a situation rather than a scene, a fragment that has casually broken away from a continuous flow of time. Individual stage lights face one another from opposite directions, casting light toward the center and tracing an invisible circular orbit, much like the sun and moon illuminating the Earth. At the center of this imagined orbit stand two folding screens placed back to back, while an upright metal plate mounted on wheels evokes, like a riddle, an unknown axis of vast and weighty time. Everything appears still, yet carries traces of movement, traces of life. Whether something has disappeared or has yet to emerge, there is neither narrative nor form. Upon the traces of an empty movement, light and motion alone continue to flicker without rest.

 As though motion has been deliberately halted at a point suspended between material and form, Earth Theater awakens an awareness of alienation and absence on a visual-perceptual level. How can flashing light, the solid materiality of metal, or vivid ropes spread openly across the floor evoke visual alienation and absence? There is no escaping it. The work produces a visual illusion in which sky and earth, sea and sky, and all boundaries seem to dissolve into one another. For instance, a tree branch placed on a pedestal before one metal folding screen creates a perceptual shift when viewed against another folding screen behind it, where fragments of bulbs are arranged across the floor. The gap between the microscopic and the monumental, the tremor of the eye responding to red and blue light, and even the paradoxical tension between life and death generated by what is disappearing and what is yet to emerge ripple before the viewer like waves, one after another. For this reason, even as the work invites deep visual immersion, it soon confronts the viewer with a sense of visual emptiness. Siha Kim refers to this as an “unfinished world.”

* “For some time now, I have been fascinated by a small modular theater, the metallic friction sounds produced by its materials, and, in a different sense, the scents of grass, flowers, and forests in their primordial state rather than artificial fragrances. I am also drawn to the materiality of seeds and bulbs that condense all of these elements. More precisely, I am interested in everything that exists in a state of mixture, crossing between the material and the immaterial. (…) Most things we perceive as perfect are closer to errors of perception and sensation. We simply choose to believe they are perfect. Then we attach all kinds of reasons to them and grant them legitimacy. There is an image of perfection that has been unilaterally defined by the majority. We often come to believe that the world of a romanticist—swept up by hope without any real plans—is a flawless and perfect one. (…) For this reason, in this exhibition, I seek to construct an experimental space for sculptural poetics through unequal and unfinished forms, forms whose completion is not guaranteed, forms that remain in a state of suspension, their future identity still unknown.” (Excerpt from Siha Kim’s synopsis of Earth Theater)

 

 Earth Theater resembles the backstage of a theater before the curtain has risen, or perhaps after it has already fallen. Siha Kim appears to have no intention of raising the curtain again. This endlessly deferred situation—or, in the artist’s words, this state of suspension—intersects with the nonlinear perception it evokes within the theater, becoming an even greater enigma. 

* In Perfect World (2025, Seoul Art Space Geumcheon PS333), a two-person exhibition with Ye-eun Min, Siha Kim highlighted several key themes that run throughout their practice through the new work Earth Theater. The stage and theater suggest the boundaries between reality and unreality through which the artist constructs the work. These may also be understood as boundaries between the visible and the invisible, or perhaps as boundaries between opposing directions, like those between beginning and end, or between the raising and lowering of a curtain. The enigmatic sense of dissonance felt between a severed tree branch placed on a pedestal and a bulb-shaped sculpture bound with rope subtly overturns perception, much like the imperceptible transition between day and night. Another recurring theme is the irony of life and death. Previously, in works such as Confession: A Rose that Burns the World (2025) and Lost Garden (2024), and the Piece of Sculpture series (2023), the artist explored the irony of a world in which life and death coexist in an absurd and inseparable manner. One might think of the abstract sense of scale and weight between life and death evoked by the volume of dried flowers laid out neatly like the bodies of the dead.

   Earth Theater captures, as a continuation of this inquiry, a moment in which the self (the body) and the stage, reality and unreality, life and death—all of these heterogeneous elements—converge. Alongside it, by placing Bed (Piece of Sculpture) (2025) across the floor, the artist evokes a sensation that renders present the emptiness of an invisible negative, something that is neither material nor form, upon the floorboards of a(n) (un)real stage. Bed (Piece of Sculpture) is closely connected to the Piece of Sculpture series, through which the artist has been actively experimenting with the form and concept of “sculpture” since 2023. The work originated from a simple sculptural desire: after becoming absorbed in the acts of cutting, assembling, and constructing metal sheets to create a form, the artist turned toward what remained behind—the cut-off fragments, the materials that had failed to participate in the formation of the final shape—and brought them back into the process of assembly and construction, ultimately allowing them, too, to become “sculpture.”

   Embedded within the seemingly playful notion of a “piece” of “sculpture” is the sculptor’s own candid experience. As the artist explains: “This world contains fragments of the Perfect World I was working toward, the world I sought to create. There are cut and discarded pieces of metal, a theater that resembles a stage, elements from nature, and loosely woven hemp cords. Some are already made, while others remain only partially formed. Rather than constructing narratives or connections, I worked as though scattering components across a space.” (Excerpt from Siha Kim’s synopsis of Earth Theater) The Piece of Sculpture series can be understood as that “something” within the theater where unfinished fragments—fragments that have not yet become sculpture—continuously defer and suspend both “piece” and “sculpture” within the space between the two. 

* Let us return to Bed (Piece of Sculpture). Like an enlarged template, the metal sheet, cut through with outlines of various shapes, lies on the floor, having already lost its original function. Perhaps Siha Kim sought to reveal those cut-out contours—those absences punctured like holes, so to speak. Yet these remnants lay bare, revealing the irony of the remaining torso, of the body as material substance. Neither material nor form, they present themselves simply as “remains”—as pieces of a sculpture. This “unfinished” material-form, its body pierced through and laid across the floor, traces a vast orbit from the position where sculpture and piece, positive and negative, face one another without ever fully meeting, repeating the visual alienation that runs through Earth Theater. 

* “And yet, in this exhibition, I decided to create my own unfinished world, a world left incomplete by the pressure of trying to depart from my Perfect World, and by the anxiety and sense of lack that accompanied it. I chose to call that world Earth Theater —A theater that never rests.” (Excerpt from Siha Kim’s synopsis of Earth Theater) Moving between belief in and skepticism toward the three-dimensional reality of the world, Siha Kim repeatedly embraces, in their own words, error and suspension. In doing so, they contemplate a theater that never rests, a theater in which the world itself continually defers something, and through that very deferral makes the world perceptible to us.

   That large, heavy metal plate—an absurd three-dimensional form moving between material and shape, object or sculpture—arrests a situation unfolding upon a stage where immense forces intersect. By suspending it in place, the artist evokes the tension of a silent theater, ultimately bringing into being the impossible time-space of the “stage” as the material manifestation of this mode of thought. In other words, constantly moving back and forth between pursuing and being pursued by the paradox of a powerful force that delays something and the persistence of that impossibility, the artist resembles a sculptor endlessly handling the negative space of reality that envelops both sculpture and piece, uncertain of what else to do.  

* In Earth Theater, a microscopic perspective akin to a womb coexists with a macroscopic perspective that imagines the Earth within the vastness of the cosmos. At the same time, the interior of the body intersects with the immense external environment that surrounds it. Movement toward life and the weight of death are gathered together. Light and shadow repeat along the same orbit. The artist calls this sculptural moment—where two worlds come into contact—a stage, and that place a theater. In other words, it is a “piece of sculpture.” 

   Siha Kim’s work exists alongside reality: alongside real events, real spaces, real objects, and all living and dead things that inhabit the real world. For this reason, the work can at times appear either to mirror reality or to construct it like a work of fiction. Yet upon closer examination, as the artist notes, “Some things are already made, while others remain only partially formed. Rather than constructing narratives or connections, I worked as though scattering components across space.” In this sense, the artist is less a storyteller than someone who lays things out upon a stage. They arrange these elements as though casting them into place, while drawing attention to the stage itself—the theater—as a site through which one can trace the vast emptiness surrounding them and the invisible interiority they contain.

   Through years of practice, Siha Kim has developed a distinctive sensitivity to spatial installation, using the full potential of sculptural installation to explore the relationships between material, form, and space. “I give form to the fragmented aspects of the Earth through a number of sculptural objects. One of them will take the shape of a dahlia bulb that condenses all of these elements, while another will resemble the forms of soil and grass, represented through pieces of wood. If the bulb comes to possess life, it will unfold its own story, and this new protagonist will be met with generous applause. If it simply dries out, however, we will begin to think about its existence and purpose. And then, perhaps, everyone will rush in to perform CPR on it.  (laughs) In that way, my own psychological experiences—anxiety, a sense of lack, and so on—become shared by others. That is what I hope for.” (Excerpt from Siha Kim’s synopsis of Earth Theater) Here, sculpture becomes narrative, narrative becomes material, and form becomes space. In this continuous transformation, we catch a glimpse of the mind of an artist who sculpts, writes, and builds stages. 

What If Viewed Longer and Slower

Hangil Jang

Site and Memory

Director Claude Lanzmann, rejecting the use of archival footage and dramatization, focuses on interviews and location filming in Shoah (1985). Nearly three decades after the end of the war, Lanzmann and his crew visit the site of a former extermination camp in Poland, where no visible traces of the atrocities remain. Instead, a lush natural landscape of grass and trees stretches before them. Nevertheless, survivor Simon Srebnik is able to locate the site, which Lanzmann later refers to as a “non-site of memory.”

Over the past 40 years, Shoah has sparked extensive discussions in which the notion of "non-sites of memory," among others, emerged as a key issue. Lanzmann argues that indirect, abstract knowledge of the tragic event alone does not entail true understanding, while visiting the site without prior knowledge prevents one from truly seeing it. His belief in the inseparability of knowing through seeing and seeing through knowing extends beyond the Holocaust, encompassing atrocities across different times and places. "What, then, to do with these sites—these sites of destruction... What should one make of them cinematically?... What was the point of returning to the sites?"  These questions posed by Georges Didi-Huberman remain unanswered to this day. At sites where the traces of past tragedies are absent, what should filmmakers capture, and how should they present it?

The Internalization of Measurement

In FOOTAGE (2015) and (100ft) (2016), both shot on 16mm film, Minjung Kim explores the conditions and materiality of analog film through various approaches. One of the most striking aspects is the term foot, which refers to not only the bottommost part of the body but also the imperial unit of length (ft.) and the origin of the word "footage" denoting recorded film. In today’s era of digital video, where the duration of footage is no longer tied to physical length, it is easy to overlook that this term originates from a measurement based on the human foot. A roll of 16mm film measures 100 feet, containing 4,000 frames, and at a projection speed of 24 frames per second, it runs for approximately 2 minutes and 46 seconds. This is something that an analog filmmaker must internalize, especially when filming must be uninterrupted.

In FOOTAGE, composed of numerous still images depicting feet—from photographs and classical paintings to medical diagrams—the conversion between physical length and duration of time is a key element, alongside the polysemy of the word foot. Every frame displays numbers engraved in the four corners, each indicating frame per second, frame per foot, length in feet, and time in seconds. The frame count per second ranges from 1 to 24, while the frame count per foot ranges from 1 to 40. Each time the frame counts reset, the foot and second increase by one, progressing until they reach 100 feet and 166 seconds, respectively.

In contrast, (100ft) presents physical length differently. On-screen, two figures take 100 slow steps, against the backdrop of Soda Lake, from the left edge of the frame to the right. The total runtime of the film is 3 minutes, which translates to about 108 feet of film; subtracting the time occupied by the credits gives approximately 100 feet. While the actual distance walked near Soda Lake will almost never align with the width of the screen, time—a fixed variable across all screening environments—becomes the crucial metric for approximating the original distance captured in the film. Through (100ft), the audience experiences how the filmmaker internalizes the formulas involving measurement of and conversion between time, distance, and length. The difference in foot size between the two individuals creates discrepancies in the distance they walk, reflecting the inherent ambiguity of measurement claimed to be objective. This ambiguity also corresponds to the subjective sense of time that individuals associate with internalized measurements of distance and length. It is through this internalization that Kim's film ultimately is made significant. In (100ft), the frames contain no elements that subvert visual illusion or direct markers pointing to the material conditions of the film. However, without contemplating beyond the on-screen appearance of Soda Lake and the two figures walking, one cannot fully grasp the film’s fundamental conditions—distance and time.

Unlike the direct approaches of Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963) or Paul Sharits’ Frozen Film Frames Series (1966–77) that visually expose the materiality of film, Minjung Kim constructs an allegory that guides viewers to become gradually aware of the structure and materiality of film as they watch. The structure and materiality of the film are not simply observable facts or fragments of knowledge but rather sensory experiences, inherently resistant to being fully encapsulated within an individual frame. As a result, the audience must constantly reflect on and imagine what extends beyond what is visible on the screen. This process mirrors the observation of the "non-sites of memory."

Subtractive Film

In Minjung Kim's work, her exploration of the materiality of film intersects with the (im)possibility of capturing past events on camera. "The red filter is withdrawn." (2020) consists mainly of two types of location footage: that of former Japanese military fortifications in Jeju, built during the final stages of the Pacific War as part of Operation Ketsu-Go No. 7, and the sites associated with the 1948 Jeju Massacre. Most of the locations in the film bear only faint traces of the Jeju Massacre and—in the case of Operation Ketsu-Go—the events that would have occurred. The waters flow and clouds glide across the sky, along with swaying grass and tree branches in the wind, as if to sweep away the remnants of the past tragedies that the island has endured. The resulting vistas are beautiful—but is it acceptable to depict massacre sites in such aesthetically pleasing ways? Occasionally, signs or small iron fences appear as markers of the past events. However, like Kim's earlier works, “The red filter is withdrawn." invites viewers to engage with what lies beyond the visible surface of the images.

A crucial cue guiding such engagement is the subtitles, which consist of excerpts from Hollis Frampton’s performance A Lecture (1968). Among them, the following passage warrants a closer explanation:

It is only a rectangle of white light, but it is all films. We can never see more within our rectangle, only less… A red film would subtract green and blue from the white light of our rectangle. So we should not say: There is not enough here, I want to see more. 

The experience of cinema is produced by the reduction of light. What we perceive as films in “full color” are, in fact, those that have undergone the greatest light reduction. Color film consists of three layers sensitized and respond to red, green, and blue light. Naturally, the amount of light diminishes as it passes through each successive layer. However, in the context of Frampton’s performance where a projector is used to demonstrate such a property, a more intuitive analogy is offered by the earlier Technicolor process based on subtractive colors. Technicolor is a process that involves shooting black-and-white film through red, green, and blue filters, dyeing each resulting strip in cyan, magenta, and yellow respectively, and layering the dyed strips in front of the projector’s light bulb to create “full color” movies on screen.

In other words, the red filter refers to not an additional layer for color overlay but a removal of the green and blue filters or films that filter out certain spectra of light. Kim exploits the very moment that Frampton’s A Lecture becomes ironically persuasive across different spatiotemporal contexts, so that “The red filter is withdrawn.” could sensitize the viewers to the subtractive color systems of cinema, where reducing light paradoxically allows "more" to be viewed. Additionally, the film reflects on the human desire "to see more", as exemplified by the Exhibition Room 4 at the Jeju 4・3 Peace Memorial Hall. The exhibition reconstructs the Darangshi Cave massacre site—where 11 civilians were slaughtered—including even the skeletal remains of the victims. The physical reality of light and film—especially in light of what it means to “see more” or "see less"—runs counter to the desire associated with the image formed on the human retina. The beautiful natural landscape of the massacre site does not “romanticize” the event but instead underscores that it is also an image resulting from subtraction. Meanwhile, the red images, produced by allowing more light to pass, paradoxically bring us closer to the event than the natural-color images.

Everything on the screen gains meaning beyond mere visibility only by being aware of the film’s conditions, and this process differs from the inseparability of knowing and seeing that Lanzmann argued. Watching Kim’s films does not require prior knowledge external to them. Instead, all the clues are already embedded in the light that illuminates the screen before the viewer, the projector running behind the audience, and the film strip in it. All the clues the audience needs to perceive the traces of the past hidden in nature can be found within the screening space itself.

“An Ordinary Scene that Someone Might Have Seen” 

Yeonsook Less (a.k.a. Rita)

I first encountered Boyun Jang’s work at Art Spectrum 2012, held at the Leeum Museum of Art. In this exhibition, the artist presented A Thousand Years, a project in which she collected over 350 abandoned photographs and foregrounded the recurring presence of Gyeongju. In the 1970s and 80s, Gyeongju was a must-visit destination for school trips, honeymoons, and family vacations. As we know, the Gyeongju of that era no longer exists—not only because its heyday as a tourist hotspot has passed but also because photography, as a medium, attests to the absence of the present. This absence evokes a tender nostalgia for a past never experienced—someone else’s life captured in the photographs that make up A Thousand Years—or an eerie premonition. Photography, regardless of its subject, immediately detaches itself from the present moment of "now," marking a past that is no longer "here." This inevitable temporal disjunction between past and present, as we know, opens up a space-time where traces of art's aura—democratized in the age of technological reproduction—continue to linger. Consequently, photography continually generates residues or surpluses—elements that cannot be fully reduced to interpretation—due to the inherent disjunction between time and materiality.

Through a “fantasy or imaginative reconstruction”  of the "debris" of a past that can never be fully restored to its original form, Boyun Jang presented a "possible world" in A Thousand Years—a kind of counter-history that might have existed somewhere between fiction and fact. Jang adopts a similar approach in two projects undertaken at the Seoul Art Space Geumcheon. Her ongoing series Black Veil, which began in 2021, explores the “other stories”  of Korean nurses dispatched to Germany—stories discarded and forgotten within the “official narrative”  of their lives. The project includes a video in which an international student actress residing in Korea recites scripts written in the form of letters, based on the real lives of these nurses, as if reading on their behalf. It also includes a publication that collages fragmentary texts in various forms, featuring fictional reinterpretations of historical records—such as facts and testimonies about these nurses—and blurring the boundaries between past and present. The Korean nurses dispatched to Germany in the 1970s were hailed as key contributors to the Miracle on the Han River and, like the miners who went to Germany, were regarded as export laborers tasked with earning foreign currency. In Black Veil, their lives emerge as indistinct figures of someone, occupying the unbridgeable and unfillable “gap between history and the individual, between record and memory” . These nameless and faceless figures are summoned through the voice of an actress and the words of the artist. This voice represents the “shadows”  or “ghosts” forgotten by History with a capital H. Ghosts have no tangible presence. Still, as Jacques Derrida observed in his reading of Hamlet, they demand nothing more than the possibility of a response—a responsibility—to their voices.

For Boyun Jang, the notion of responsibility seems to signify the capacity to empathize with ghostly others, even while confronting the limitations of historical records and testimonies, which can only hint at possible truths about the past. Like a medium bridging life and death, Jang channels the irreproducible “footage”  of a past that cannot be fully captured through the language of official or dominant historical narratives, transforming it into a form of fictional and alternative truth through her works. This approach extends to her Okinawa series, which draws inspiration from the life of Bae Bong-gi, a Japanese military comfort woman whose story is recounted in Fumiko Kawada’s book The Red Tiled House.  Enticed by the promises of making a living, Bae left Yesan in Chungcheong Province in 1943 and was forcibly taken to Tokashiki Island in Okinawa Prefecture to serve as a comfort woman for the Japanese army. To avoid deportation from Okinawa, she became the first person from the Korean Peninsula to testify that she was a survivor of the comfort women system. Despite the profound shock and impact of Bae Bong-gi’s testimony on Japanese society in 1975, her name remained virtually unknown in South Korea, largely due to postwar ideological divides. A feminist scholar Kim Hyun Gyung analyzed Bae as a “subaltern”—a marginalized subject—and examined how her life and death became engulfed in silence.  Before publicly coming forward as a survivor of the comfort women system, she was voiceless due to her statelessness. After her testimony, her ties to the pro-North Korean Chongryon (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan) rendered her a taboo figure in South Korean society, leaving her with no audience. Even after her death, her remains became a site of political contention, as both Chongryon and the pro-South Korean Mindan (Korean Residents Union in Japan) appropriated her life and death within their respective political frameworks. This process “activated the politics of speaking for,” perpetuating a vicious cycle that foreclosed any possibility of alternative representations of her life and death.  Yet, when historical evidence—such as records and testimonies—is scarce and even such evidence cannot be verified as “complete facts,” the possibility of alternative representations must inevitably begin at the limits of its inherent impossibility.

I am referencing Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation.”  Hartman argues for the need to “imagine what might have happened or what might have been said or might have been done,”  both alongside and against the painful legacy of slavery's official archives. Her reason for employing this approach to historical narrative is as follows: “By flattening the levels of narrative discourse and confusing narrator and speakers, I hope to illuminate the contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact, to topple the hierarchy of discourse, and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices.”  Similarly, Jang’s Okinawa series serves as an entry point for imagining the “ordinary” landscapes of Okinawa—those that Bae Bong-gi might have once encountered—beyond her publicly sanctioned identity as a “victim” or “survivor” of war, state power, and male violence. Boyun Jang’s photographs capture the serene yet seemingly indifferent silence of Okinawa’s landscapes, interspersed with fleeting glimpses of people laughing and chatting, wild plants growing untamed, and man-made objects that look as though they have been there for ages. Among these images, what drew my attention most was a cluster of bananas hanging heavily from a tree. In The Red Tiled House, Bae Bong-gi recounts how she was lured to Naha Port, en route to Tokashiki Island, by false promises of abundance: “If you go to the mountains, fruits are everywhere, and if you lie beneath a tree with your mouth open, the fruit will fall right in.”  Looking at the photograph of the bananas—captured as though to belatedly fulfill Bae’s long-lost wish—I reflected that photography today might serve not only as a medium to summon the voices of forgotten others into the “here and now” but also as a vessel to create a fictional, ritualistic space on their behalf. “An ordinary scene that someone might have seen” emerges as the only moment of suspended judgment within the seamless master or dominant narrative that connects past, present, and future. By evoking such moments, Jang’s Okinawa series offers solace to the unreachable utopian dreams of the past. In this sense, her work becomes a fragile yet persistent “response” to the other—a quiet defiance against history, enacted through history itself.

The Experiential Aspect of Painting

Haeju Kim

Once again, I am reminded how challenging it is to articulate a painting in words. A painting emerges from the convergence of countless choices—colors, lines, the texture of paint, and methods of application. Simply explaining the process analytically is insufficient to convey the emotions that arise during appreciation, while speaking solely about emotions seems inadequate in properly revealing the questions underlying the meticulous choices the artist makes during the creative process. 

I have encountered the works of Hyangro Yoon through various exhibitions over the past decade. When I first saw her works in the early to mid-2010s, I was particularly struck by her production process, which was the focus of many analytical discussions at the time. These discussions primarily described her works as an exploration of the originality of images—a hallmark of painting in the digital age—through the appropriation and referencing of media images. A notable example is her Screenshot series from 2016 onward, where she erased characters from animations and painted scenes using graphics that express energy. Other significant examples include the Screensaver series after 2018, which referenced images from art history and explored how sculptures could be constructed within paintings using planar forms and flat surfaces, and the Tagging series from 2022 onward, which revisited painting techniques by referencing the tagging methods of graphic artists. This ongoing exploration of painting methodologies through the borrowing and referencing of images remains a defining characteristic of Yoon's work.

However, while viewing her recent exhibitions, I have found myself contemplating the emotions directly conveyed to viewers through her works and their installation methods, rather than analyzing her painting methodologies. The captivating colors and intricate details of her artwork have always served as the initial draw for viewers. Recently, my appreciation seems to lean not only toward her technical application and experimentation but also toward the emotional depth expressed in her work. I cannot say for certain whether this shift stems from specific developments in her work or changes in my perspective as a viewer. What is clear is that I find myself increasingly focused on the emotions conveyed within the space shaped by her works—in other words, the sensations evoked through the physical experience of viewing. This appreciation deepened when I attended the artist's solo exhibition Drive to the Moon and Galaxy at Gajah Gallery in Yogyakarta in 2023.

The black and deep blue backgrounds, with spattered paint, evoke the vastness of outer space. Organic shapes, such as tree branches and roots, subtly emerge amidst these elements, signaling a shift away from the everyday visual references the artist has often explored. Instead, they evoke an impression of unseen dimensions or overlapping layers of deeper time and expansive space. The composition of images—where underlying elements seep through and overlap with the surface—creates a multilayered spacetime within a single plane. The artist's installation methods, which transform flat canvases into sculptural forms or integrate paintings with spatial elements, further enhance this impression. As of December 2024, her most recent ongoing exhibition, Mirae, features a striking departure from traditional wall-mounted displays. Instead, the artist has installed divided canvas surfaces on the ceiling, where they converge to form the work. This exhibition, held in a commercial building rather than a conventional art gallery, invites viewers to stand or lie beneath the paintings, gazing upward at the images as if observing a church ceiling fresco. Vertical trees are reimagined as horizontal elements on the ceiling, merging the space between sky and earth while aligning the viewer's body horizontally. This positioning of the body within the image expands the experiential dimension of the painting, leaving the viewer in a state of humility and vulnerability. Additionally, the changing spatial conditions, influenced by the winter light streaming through the windows, become an integral part of the viewing experience.

This exhibition experience evokes fundamental emotions deeply intertwined with the human body while simultaneously invoking abstract, immeasurable phenomena associated with concepts such as loss and creation, aging, life, and death. The abstract forms in her paintings and their installations encourage reflection on what precisely sparks such profound emotional resonance. The colors and forms selected by the artist during the creation of her works and exhibitions evoke inherent associations in the viewer—for example, contemplating infinity and death through monochromatic paintings extended into space or recalling past memories of gazing at church ceiling frescoes. These associations may also connect to the artist’s long-standing practice of referencing as part of her painting methodologies. Hyangro Yoon appears to be exploring new ways of fostering deep emotional connections with viewers through abstract forms and spatial installations in her work. As both the artist’s and viewers’ life experiences continue to accumulate, the repertoire of associations will expand, further enriching the emotional exchanges within her works and installations.

Today, the Last Night

 Nayeon Gu

This is about my end and the end of us all. On the last night, if only we had known it was coming—if we had realized it could have been prevented—one can only imagine the terrible regret we would feel at such belated awareness. How many of us would wish to rewind time, as if rewinding a film reel, to keep today from becoming the last night? Even if we were to gouge our eyes in repentance, like Oedipus who failed to perceive what lay plainly before him, such lament would hold no meaning in the face of an imminent end. Like Laius, Oedipus’s father, we foolishly cling to oracles to approach the future, while turning a blind eye to the unmistakable signs of the present. We turn away from the contours of a future already revealed here and now, casting our hopes solely on a more prosperous, more useful one. Drunk on the wisdom that solved the riddle of “humanity” itself, we slaughter nature, the origin of our existence. Moreover, we fortify boundless frontiers with the blinding madness of firearms and inhale the heat of flames that fuel the power of machines, almost to the point of suffocation. Our shared last night hurtles toward its conclusion—a tragedy stripped of pathos. 

I am writing this without having seen Ji Hye Yeom’s work, The Last Night. Yet, I feel as though I have already encountered it—perhaps because I have seen the images and “lingering words” the artist shared. I believe her decision to share scattered still frames before the video work was an attempt to momentarily arrest the dynamic nature of time in moving images. When identically sized images are presented under the title The Last Night without a defined narrative, the deep spaces between them become imbued with subtle signs of a future latent in our present, awakening the last night we call today. By transcending the linear time intrinsic to the medium, the strata of images—perceivable only in stillness—possess a compelling initiative that demands our contemplation. This effort of presenting images in a state of delay and stillness, rather than solely relying on the motion of video, reflects the artist’s sustained exploration of painting. Just as the icons condensed through direct painting reveal themselves to us, laden with countless foreshadowings, the images in The Last Night expand into autonomous narratives of an ending already underway. 

The word crisis has long become a common term, encapsulating much of the way existence unfolds in this world. Despite being surrounded by countless crises—climate and environmental crises, economic crises, food crises, pandemic crises, and war crises—humanity remains strangely indifferent. Our chronic apathy toward everything beyond ourselves has led us into the desolate landscape of The Last Night, shaped by the cumulative weight of these crises born of our indifference. Ji Hye Yeom’s work emerges as a manifestation of images that perceive the crises saturating both past and present, like a siren pressing urgently against the world of today. As Georges Didi-Huberman observed about Pasolini’s films, this entails perceiving an era that appears to pass without any signs of crisis—a rediscovery of a state of emergency in the presence of history.  Swept along by the relentless acceleration of civilization, repeatedly failing to brake at critical junctures, will humanity only recognize its helplessness at the very end? Yeom’s oeuvre, with its persistent engagement with innumerable dangers and their signals, stands as an apocalyptic reflection on our deeply rooted indifference and the impotent passage of time in the present. At the same time, it is an urgent metaphor for the catastrophic future, as glimpsed through the lens of today.

Ji Hye Yeom’s The Last Night presents an image of a neither chaotic nor violent apocalypse, encountered at the edge of space-time where water and fire, air and earth intersect. The night when humanity, having relentlessly pursued its own destruction, finally fades away, bears the solitary melancholy of a dying Prometheus. In Yeom’s work, fire emerges as a fundamental lexicon of nature, imbued with intrinsic ambivalence. Yet in The Last Night, fire is darker than ever. A notable reference in the work is The Psychoanalysis of Fire by Gaston Bachelard. In this context, fire, both subject and object, represents the end of the poetics of its imagery. Bachelard describes fire as intimate yet universal, the only phenomenon capable of accommodating two opposing values—good and evil. This duality resonates with the “lingering words” Yeom provided alongside the images of The Last Night, which explore fire’s poetic production of imagery. Fire becomes the most dialectical element in the creation of imagery.  For Ji Hye Yeom, fire embodies both humanity and nature, as well as destruction and creation. Its imagery encompasses the duality of civilization as intellect and destruction, the duality of life as existence and death, and the duality that traces back to the primordial plane or monad of matter. Like Pele, the goddess of Hawaiian mythology, the ambivalence of volcanic fire shapes the world’s terrain. However, the human intellect’s insatiable drive for renewal—what Bachelard termed the Prometheus Complex—distorts this ambivalence into a reductive state of binary opposition. This transformation transcends human intellect, igniting flames of mutual destruction, generating uncontrollable mechanical life, and exacerbating disasters driven by unending carbon emissions. Ultimately, it propels humanity down a path of self-destruction—toward its last night.

Ji Hye Yeom’s work deciphers the signs of a foreseen future, offering chilling insights that transcend temporal boundaries. This is not because she possesses an extraordinary ability to predict the future but because she perceives the future embedded in the present when she confronts and interprets its signs. If we were to describe this quality in her work as "foresight," it would be the power of images that emerges from an acute sensitivity to the signs of the present—a deeply logical deduction rooted in the premise of the now. For instance, her 2016 work They come, Swiftly, Stealthily delivers a starkly reflective message in the context of the pandemic era. Likewise, the paradox in CyborgHandstanderus' Nose (2021)—where human-crafted technology sings of nature amid consuming flames—forces us to rethink the harsh realities we face today. Yet, The Last Night offers no such room for reconsideration. A world devoid of humanity after the last night may resemble the utopia humanity once dreamed of, but it is ultimately a hollow aftermath of extinction, witnessed by no one. As all human creations become material for AI’s deep learning and the intelligence gap between humans and machines continues to widen, the celebratory toasts of capital mark the final chapter of a failed modernization cloaked in the rhetoric of development and progress. Thus, Ji Hye Yeom’s The Last Night emerges as both an image of the future we are moving toward and an image of the end manifesting in the present, perceived through the reconfiguration of reality's montage, urging us toward an urgent and profound reflection.

Images That Descend and Persist: The Path, Contact, and Message of Arong Chung

Yuki Konno

Arong Chung’s solo exhibition Be Careful What You Wish For (2024) at Project Space SARUBIA featured the work In the Wood (2024). The largest piece in the exhibition, In the Wood, presents a grand forest scene, but there is something unusual—an absence. While the trees occupy the center and clouds form the background, the foreground is left empty. It appears as though additional trees or other elements could fill this space, yet it remains open and unfilled. Viewers encounter this painting as if stepping onto a stage. This void echoes the open space in an earlier work, WoodPaths (2014). In Chung’s 2014 solo exhibition titled Primordial World at Project Space Mo, the painting WoodPaths revealed a distant human figure. Another work from the same exhibition, Primordial World, shared the forest as its setting. While Primordial World contained no sign of human presence, WoodPaths included a figure. If we interpret the traces of human footsteps as forming a path through the woods that allows some presence to emerge, then In the Wood (2024) seems to accept the messages conveyed in its expansive stage-like space. On the left, geometric patterns come into view. Among the surrounding undergrowth, faces emerge. As the empty space remains untouched and symbolic motifs, fish swimming through the earth, and forest spirits are rendered, the painting begins to transcend the realm of mere visual representation of nature. The symbols and spirits, seemingly retreating into the background—along with the clouds and forest—suggest that the painting serves as a site for humans to ascribe meaning and transmit messages.

Spirits, fish, and witch-like symbolic motifs act as carriers of messages within the painting. We must reconsider the phrase “absence of human presence” applied to Primordial World. While the painting may initially appear devoid of life, it contains mechanisms that draw the viewer’s gaze and imbue meaning—whether inside, outside, or straddling the boundaries of the frame. Two works from the Primordial World exhibition, Tranquil and Peaceful Times (Christina’s World) (2014) and Tranquil and Peaceful Times (2014), illustrate a notable visual contrast. The former contains no human figures while the latter depicts two. Yet both works share a commonality: they invite viewers to search for meaning within their subjects. Examining the composition, a tree is visible in the upper-right corner of both works. It appears to be the same tree depicted at different points in time. There is even a smaller piece with the same title where the tree is the sole focus. In Tranquil and Peaceful Times, two figures walk toward the tree. Meanwhile, in Tranquil and Peaceful Times (Christina’s World), the viewer’s pursuit of meaning revolves around the painted scene itself. In “Christina’s World,” Christina does not appear on the canvas. Only Christina knows that this place is her world; her world exists here. At the same time, one might imagine Christina hiding somewhere in the grassy field. Like the partial image at the end of the Primordial World exhibition catalog, a life-sized ambiguous figure flickers between presence and absence within the grass. Christina’s world exists there, yet it is simultaneously shaped by the viewer’s interpretation.

What do Arong Chung’s paintings reveal in the unseen? This question can be explored in connection with Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, which understands art as both the concealment of the earth and an opening to the world. Chung creates mechanisms within her paintings that open up a world and establish points of contact. Witch-like motifs in her works—or in series where symbols are rendered independently—function almost as talismans, imbuing the paintings with a sense of magical force. Similarly, some scenes evoke biblical verses, conveying moral messages. At times, she uses iconography to convey meaning, as in Fac Fortia et Patere, Vincit qui Patitur (Do Brave Deeds and Endure. He Who Endures Will Conquer.) (2024), a piece reflecting the artist’s personal aspirations for growth. Chung’s diverse visual language—spanning natural landscapes, symbolic motifs, and morally instructive scenes—makes identifying a unifying theme challenging. However, all these works can be understood as paintings that prepare the canvas for meanings and messages to emerge. As suggested by the title of her solo exhibition at Project Space SARUBIA, Be Careful What You Wish For, the artist’s preparatory work is rediscovered and redefined through the settings she creates in her paintings. This pursuit is reflected in works like the Archetype for Self-Realization (2024) series and pieces displayed on the gallery walls, including Fiat Amore (Let There Be Love) (2024), Cracking Egg (2024), and Be Careful What You Wish For (2024), which depict hands holding or touching objects, glimmering fingers, or hands reaching outward.

The hands Arong Chung paints do more than merely touch objects; they acquire meaning and messages through the act. In other words, hands that reach out or attempt to touch allow meanings and messages to be brought into and through the painting. When a hand is directed toward something, or when it touches or holds an object, it becomes evident that the earlier metaphor of "the earth" is not solely about solidity. Chung’s reference to Carl Jung's concept of Jungian Archetypes aligns with Gaston Bachelard's perspective, which views the psychoanalytic attitude as deeply profound and structurally resilient. Some elements can be acquired, be imbued with meaning, and carry messages—not from firm ground, but from a state of suspension in midair. This is why she paints clouds in works like Be Careful What You Wish For and Fiat (Let It Be Done) (2024), as well as a UFO in UFO (2024). Meanings and messages are not reducibly anchored to psychoanalytic desire; instead, they descend from a void or the sky, becoming images that are grasped—or that grasp us. For example, in Be Careful What You Wish For, clouds occupy the background but their presence is fluid and unfixed like real clouds, unbound by desire. The clouds and the UFO represent the advent of enigmatic entities but bear an indicative and ambivalent character, which can also be interpreted as symbols of salvation.

At this point, the ambivalence depends on the psychological state projected by the viewer, making it ultimately shaped by their interpretation. Thus, we return to the beginning: standing in the empty space of Be Careful What You Wish For. How can we bring forth meanings and messages utilizing the mechanisms prepared for us? Could the path of judgment and interpretation lies between the earth and the world? Approaching this space might involve drawing meaning from what is given—or wandering aimlessly, unable to do so. Arong Chung reflects, “As I face my canvas up close and paint countless trees, branches, flowers, shrubs, soil, and stones that overwhelm me, I find myself wandering within the frame with a brush and paint in hand, like a flâneur lost in the forest—my subject of painting.” Yet, she stands on the stage inside the incredible realm of painting and paints that world, a fantastical world. Spirits, symbols, clouds, and forests float above the earth, and viewers also find their place within this space. The title Release of Ego (2024) is aptly chosen, but could it signify a soul freed from the body, reappearing before us in the form of a cloud? In Arong Chung’s pictorial space, both unfamiliar and welcoming, the artist and the viewer confront and embrace the meanings and messages to invite them into their own.

Sculpting the Time of Gyeong (경/景)

Helen Jungyeon Ku

The term jogyeong (조경/造景) translates to “landscape architecture.” The character jo (조/造) is a verb meaning “to create,” while its object, gyeong (경/景), is defined in the dictionary as “the distinct appearance of a specific area—not as separate elements, such as forests, houses, farmland, roads, rivers, or waterways, but as the unified visual effect created by their combination.” In this sense, it refers to scenery or landscape. Although the Sino-Korean term gyeong encompasses a broader scope than simple scenery or landscapes,  jogyeong typically refers to the technical act of crafting cultural landscapes through human activity. This is because jogyeong is often understood as a practice aimed at environmental beautification and enhancing spatial value. For instance, in urban planning or apartment complex design, jogyeong is vital in softening the harshness of concrete and artificial structures, transforming human environments into spaces that feel closer to nature.

Hwasoo Yoo also creates landscapes. The landscapes he designs are populated with somewhat unfamiliar and peculiar forms: cut trees, fragments of curbstones, branches and wood pieces placed atop these stones, sensor-equipped branches, weeds from smart farms, and even mushrooms and ants. Together, they form landscapes interwoven with a diverse array of living and non-living entities. Some of these elements were discarded near apartment complexes or memorial forests, while others are naturally occurring wild elements. Yoo collects remnants or waste selectively consumed and abandoned by humans in urban environments, transforming them into new sculptural landscapes. This act of gathering evokes the concept of “decomposition” as proposed by Japanese modern historian Fujihara Tatsushi, which involves collecting fragments of urban waste and, through technological mediation, facilitating new encounters and interactions. In this process, something novel and aesthetic emerges through composition.

In landscaping, plants are both strategically significant and readily disposed of, depending on necessity or public demands. For example, a pine tree may be planted as a landscape feature to enhance the prestige of an apartment complex, while weeds that grow abundantly in its gardens are targeted for removal under the guise of environmental beautification. Weeds are deemed unwelcome because they disrupt the ordered landscape, embodying chaos and disorder. Hwasoo Yoo actively challenges this human-centered worldview that seeks to impose order on nature, raising critical questions about the so-called eco-friendly culture of tree burials. Is it truly justifiable to create a mountain dominated by a single species simply because pine trees are the most popular choice for memorial forests? He also laments the reality that, despite widespread criticism of pine trees for their vulnerability to pests and diseases—which makes them unsuitable as urban landscaping trees—they continue to be revered as treasured symbols. How artificial and arrogant is the notion of “returning to nature” by burying one’s ashes beneath a specific tree? Even in the final moments, humans focus on exploiting nature. To make space for these pine trees, pre-existing trees are cut down, forcibly relocated, or uprooted entirely. Trees that have completed their life cycles are classified as waste and discarded by human society. The artist gathers these remnants of trees and listens to their stories.

Several branches, mounted on the wall like a suspended installation, quiver subtly whenever someone approaches. They tremble and emit rhythmic vibrations before suddenly falling silent. Do these vibrations originate within the branches themselves, or are they a response to the movements of another presence? Rather than commemorating the death of the branches, Hwasoo Yoo restores their life. The branches, equipped with sensors, detect nearby movements and resonate in response. The trembling of these frail, desiccated branches reaches our ears, eyes, and entire bodies, and at that moment, we become acutely aware of their presence. Meanwhile, a sculpture with a wooden column set atop a severed log, resembling a torso, presents a hybrid form where contrasting shapes and textures of the same material intertwine. The unaltered natural form of the wood and the smoothly carved wooden column bring opposing realms into confrontation—not only the past and the future but also nature and the artificial, as well as the technological—creating a heightened scene where differences coexist.

Furthermore, the artist places lifeless wood scraps in a glass greenhouse where the temperature and humidity are carefully controlled. In this process, he cultivates them, transforming the greenhouse into a habitat for new life. Mushrooms sprout, ants build their nests, and earthworms and centipedes occasionally swing by. The discarded wood coexists with the ants and mushrooms, giving rise to a new ecosystem. On the concept of ecosystems, Tatsushi argues that “an ecosystem refers to an exchange system where two compounds interact by giving and receiving.” Furthermore, “it can only be called an ecosystem when the interactions between living organisms and inanimate entities coalesce into a unified whole.”   Echoing Tatsushi’s theory, Yoo’s work illustrates the emergence of a new ecosystem from discarded wood, encapsulating a tree’s journey through death, rebirth, and perpetuity.

If we observe and listen closely, countless interactions within the artist’s landscape-sculpture world come to light: the activities of invisible yet real microorganisms and non-human agents, cycles of life, the intersections of birth and death, the creation of new ecological spaces, and the coexistence of nature and technology. It is clear that humanity cannot easily evade the climate and ecological crises. To confront these challenges, new ways of thinking and spaces for dialogue about the relationships between humans and non-humans, as well as among non-humans themselves, will become increasingly necessary. In this context, Hwasoo Yoo’s sculptures invite us to turn our gaze and lend an ear to the entanglements with others across time—past, present, and future—and the responsibilities they entail. In doing so, they prompt a material awareness of the ethical and justice-related issues caused by anthropocentric thinking.

Facing up to uncertainty

Leeji Hong

The term "net art" was coined by visual artist Vuk Ćosić, who combined the words "net" (discovered in an email) and "art." Rhizome  defines it as "art that acts on the network, or is acted upon by it." Early net art often showcased the technologies of its time or explored the internet as a new environment. However, it relied heavily on networks and faced challenges in gallery displays due to interface limitations and other constraints. In the 2000s, Marisa Olson, then editor of Rhizome, redefined the internet art of the 1990s. She described it as encompassing all creations that derive materials and ideas from internet-based actions, rather than merely art viewable online. This shift marked the transition from net art to internet art. A pivotal concept during this period, as noted by visual artist Cory Arcangel, was "internet awareness," which became a key criterion for distinguishing and legitimizing internet-based creations as artworks. Post-internet art later emerged, fundamentally shifting its perspective by treating the internet as a medium rather than just a tool. This approach emphasized both utilizing and critiquing the internet environment itself. Consequently, post-internet art expanded into a broader realm of creative practices surrounding online activities. Artists like Jinseung Jang, part of the generation born after the 1980s, experienced the linear progression of net art alongside the transitions from analog to digital eras. These shifts naturally became ingrained in their visual language. Situated at the center of these transitions, they compare past and present, continually posing and exploring questions of contemporaneity through their work.

Internet-based art has been created since the 1980s. Still, as the definition of media and its platforms expanded into the digital realm, the creative practices surrounding it have been continuously redefined and transformed by rapidly changing environments. Early net art viewed cyberspace as a new domain, often exploring themes of malfunctions and uncertainties within it. However, with the proliferation of the internet and 3G smartphones, today’s digital technology has increasingly come to be seen as an extension of the human body. What was once perceived as a distinct space or dimension—the internet—has now been reconceived as an intrinsic part of oneself, seamlessly extending the physical body. Furthermore, the reality we inhabit today has evolved into a virtualized world where the boundaries between the virtual and the real have blurred, making it increasingly difficult to establish certainty. Creating art that uses this as material and language, therefore, requires a constant confrontation with uncertainty. However, Jinseung Jang’s series of works does not treat the internet merely as a collection of “immaterial” content. Instead, he approaches it as both a medium and a material form, conceptualizing the digital as a space, a material, and a tangible specific object.

The pervasive integration of digital technology into everyday life has rapidly transformed our understanding of space, time, and perception. The modern spatiotemporal coordinates have been redefined through the experience of constant connectivity enabled by the internet. Jinseung Jang's early work, Face de-perception (2017), examines how advancements in information science and biotechnology destabilize entrenched biases and perceptions, blurring the boundaries of certainty. The convergence of media technology and art continues to reshape established concepts of contemporary art, making it increasingly difficult to adhere to or confine oneself to traditional art concepts and associated aesthetic discourses. As previously mentioned, just as smartphones and digital devices have seamlessly integrated with the body, eliminating any sense of otherness, Jang’s Gooey Gear (2023) embraces the extension of the body and media's evolution within a posthuman framework. In light of the evolving dynamics of the era, the work seeks to reinterpret the relationship between the digital and the body—not as mere auxiliary tools but as extensions that foster new understandings of corporeality through the lens of posthumanism. Jang’s practice naturally incorporates media transformations and evolving perceptions of the digital, reflecting the contemporary shift toward post-anthropocentric thought. Moreover, our perspective on the world we inhabit is also changing. The internet, both a new form of information technology and a communication medium, has spread globally without restrictions, prompting contemporary art to witness the emergence of new technological images. Galleries and museums are observing, in real time, the diversification of art forms where high-tech and media converge—from digital photography and film to video installations, computer art, and new media art. “White cubes” are being replaced by “black boxes,” while small-screen films and video monitors are giving way to large-scale wall projections. Another significant phenomenon is the shift in focus in art production and analysis from physical objects to images. The conceptual shift from analog to digital has also brought about countless unforeseen impacts. Jinseung Jang explores this “digital nostalgia” by revisiting analog devices and tools from the past. By integrating analog devices that once symbolized innovation into his works, he juxtaposes past, present, and future.

Through Deluded Reality (2021), the artist reflects on his perception of the exhibition space as a kind of portal. The work explores a contemporary world that feels both familiar and unfamiliar, where the boundaries between reality and illusion, as well as the real and the virtual, have grown increasingly blurred. However, regarding the integration of technology and art, he argues that this relationship should not reduce art to a passive submission to technology. For a genuine synthesis to occur, one must reject the deterministic notion that the emergence of new media alone dictates all change. Ultimately, digital-based art in the contemporary era must move beyond passively adopting rapidly advancing technologies. Instead, it is crucial to engage with the technological environment to reveal fundamental shifts in perception. This requires continually probing the artistic foundations of digital environments and media and refusing to shy away from questions about their implications. From this perspective, Jinseung Jang’s practice transcends mere technological advancement. It persistently examines how art can evolve through its relationship with new media.