2024 Nanji Residency Critical Workshop
Text by Juri CHO* (Exhibition Curator and Art Critic)
Gijeong Goo’s Rendering ≥ World =%세GyeSe계세계Saegye
While Gijeong Goo employs the universal approaches and special effects commonly used by today's digital image makers, it seems somewhat insensitive to discuss his work merely in terms of effects or to broadly label it as media art. Depending on how they are arranged and juxtaposed, Goo's works function simultaneously as complete visual planes, lower-level digital sources for something else, material masses embedding light and sound, and products of experience design that shape the viewing body's radius. Despite the clear and explicit intentionality and self-articulation in his works produced in recent years, Goo's practice generates various questions and implications about the production and reception of images. Goo's point of consideration appears to lie in increasing the complexity of relational dimensions between technology-mediated images and the body, and the physical world that encompasses the ecological environment.
The digitally transformed images based on original photographs neither aim for realistic representation nor converge into unreadable fiction. Though it may be a hastily coined term, if we can apply the rhetoric of "post" to Goo's series of images without particular doubt, it doesn't necessarily refer only to the productive aspects of digital images related to manipulation and transformation. It's a concept that considers aspects of discrimination, division, and integration possessed by the subject who senses the image.
In this respect, if there's something to be gleaned from Goo's work, it lies not in the uniqueness of the image production process, but in how he actively imagined and designed the way it would be received and read. It's also worth noting that this process is based on sophisticated digital labor. Instead of acquiring cheap images floating on the internet or purchasing stock images, Goo's production method of using ultra-high-resolution macro camera shots and rendering them with professional skill feels rather like intentional "craft."
While directing the computer program's interpolation and augmentation functions to create illusions of vivid texture and depth as images transform from flat to three-dimensional, from still to moving images, he simultaneously maintains the contradiction of controlling these results to prevent them from becoming typical images. According to the artist's shrewd intention, a small and subtle sense of foreignness seems sufficient to widen the narrow gap between what is shown and what is seen.
Before a convincing spectacle, our task is to find these subtle gaps and fake seams. We can either view the fragmentarily constructed screen as a sewn-together whole or train ourselves in a mechanical viewing angle that can appreciate it as is. We just need to remember that rendered images can be more dramatic than reality. If we remember that the artist's job is to intervene in the countless processes of contraction and expansion that occur in transferring images before our eyes, we can agree that the act of viewing is neither autonomous nor active.
I gaze at the exposed cross-section with multiple layers of vision. The series of landscapes created by Goo appear natural and concrete while simultaneously being artificial and ambiguous. Despite the remarkable verisimilitude that captures the retina, an unsettling ambiguity remains about what one has just seen. The essence of this feeling stems from slight crudeness nestled between seemingly smooth surfaces, a discomfort emanating from nature that isn't quite natural.
If the artificial sensibility that connects to nowhere in this world has been detected early on, there must have been a subtle error in Goo's calculations; if one felt nothing strange until the end, they might be somewhat insensitive. Or else, we must acknowledge the powerful fiction of images that have deeply permeated every joint of the world we live in. In this regard, it's necessary to examine the various points of fiction and error surrounding the work from multiple angles.
This is not so much to cross-verify the arguments described through the work thus far and the effects articulated through exhibitions, but because actively discovering and intentionally integrating the minute gaps embedded in digital images as a whole can enhance our resolution for viewing a world marked by the entangled images.
Meanwhile, we can consider the period around 2020 as the point when Goo's work began to gain attention domestically. Various experimental studies during his stay in Switzerland appear to have expanded visibly in both quantity and scale during the COVID period. Recalling how we encountered art and life in general through screens and communicated through images during this time, we discover the advantages of Goo's working method.
To simply understand his production method, he has been creating variations by specially photographing existing natural landscapes, digitally reconstructing and processing them, and presenting the results in formats ranging from prints and videos to mixed installations.
Looking at the series of natural landscapes that has continued steadily each year from a broader perspective, the individual works collectively form a world ("Gye" in Korean) that repeatedly reveals the difference between our schematized visual framework of the natural environment and reality. In modern society, where primitive nature and civilized individual bodies coexist, it is digital augmentation devices like cameras, prints, various projection equipment, and VR that most intimately mediate this gap or, conversely, widen it.
For Goo, who is accustomed to working at a computer all day, the connectivity between his working body and integrated devices, and conversely, the disconnection from the environment, are conditions of daily life. As mentioned earlier, there was a notable increase in image experiments and installation styles dealing with nature and plants during the COVID period.
This can be understood as an auteurist trend of contemplating non-human existence through various natural species and objects, naturally emerging based on interest in new materialism alongside Anthropocene discourse. While it might be valid to some extent to accept Goo's work as an example corresponding to these contemporary trends, we need to examine the issues in his work more pointedly.
What's important is not so much the amazement at digital sensibilities deeply infiltrated into today's human body and sensory organs, but rather how we can operate to examine without misinterpretation the image of the world that such sensibilities restructure, interpolate blank points autonomously, and recognize integrated parts through differentiation. It's about being deceived by visual illusions, actively accepting their obviousness at times, and partially filtering them.
The artist has consistently posited scenes, landscape, realm, and nature as spatial modules in his work titles, and by adding rhetoric such as Exceeded, Synthetic, and Macro before them, he has directly reflected that these are both portraits of today's nature and the reality of matter. The notion that exceeded nature can only be depicted through exceeded technology, and synthetic nature can only be shown through synthesis, seems honest in one sense yet feels like a broken solution somewhere.
The cross-sections of soil and earth, the breathing holes of moss and grass, and the vibrations of what appears to be microorganisms encountered through the work converge into an unfriendliness due to excessive detail, approaching as an excessive movement opposite to the vibrancy that life emanates. And these aspects constitute Goo's intended rendering method for how he gazes at and wishes to show the world.
However, countless artists have dealt with the complex relata surrounding nature, humans, and technology through various visual languages, and it remains one of the most crucial topics in today's socio-cultural discourse. Naturally, questions persist about where Goo's work stands in terms of its distinctiveness or uniqueness within this context, and about the true nature of visuality that defines our lives today.
If there is an interim conclusion that the artist has reached through their work by alternately connecting the axes of digital nature and digital (-ized) body, analog nature and analog body, it seems to be stating that their respective data and textures are interconnecting or overlapping somewhere in reality; ultimately in an indistinguishable state. And reaching this recognition has involved a kind of visual struggle. I'd like to call this process a form of artistic rendering.
Render, one of today's readily accessible terms, carries a comprehensive meaning of transforming something into another state. For instance, it refers to a performer's process of translating sheet music into music, the technology of processing raw materials into different forms (like solid to powder), and the process of integrating effects—shadows, colors, textures, etc.—in editing files to create final video output.
The world rendered collectively by Goo, his camera, and his computer programs markedly differs from reality, but let's consider whether this is problematic—or perhaps not—in today's world where images are becoming increasingly more expansive than reality.
While directions of direction, depths of depth, and intensities of intensity split and merge to create certain images within the artist's displayed screen, let's remember that in the world outside the screen, objects can be more distant than they appear, nature can be shallower than it sounds, and people can be lighter than they feel. This is because the screen is not a mirror image of the world.
The final authority to disassemble and re-render the unevenly rendered world's layers can only be oneself. That will be each person's mirror and way of rendering to control the world.
Text by Juri CHO* (Exhibition Curator and Art Critic)
Gijeong Goo’s Rendering ≥ World =%세GyeSe계세계Saegye
While Gijeong Goo employs the universal approaches and special effects commonly used by today's digital image makers, it seems somewhat insensitive to discuss his work merely in terms of effects or to broadly label it as media art. Depending on how they are arranged and juxtaposed, Goo's works function simultaneously as complete visual planes, lower-level digital sources for something else, material masses embedding light and sound, and products of experience design that shape the viewing body's radius. Despite the clear and explicit intentionality and self-articulation in his works produced in recent years, Goo's practice generates various questions and implications about the production and reception of images. Goo's point of consideration appears to lie in increasing the complexity of relational dimensions between technology-mediated images and the body, and the physical world that encompasses the ecological environment.
The digitally transformed images based on original photographs neither aim for realistic representation nor converge into unreadable fiction. Though it may be a hastily coined term, if we can apply the rhetoric of "post" to Goo's series of images without particular doubt, it doesn't necessarily refer only to the productive aspects of digital images related to manipulation and transformation. It's a concept that considers aspects of discrimination, division, and integration possessed by the subject who senses the image.
In this respect, if there's something to be gleaned from Goo's work, it lies not in the uniqueness of the image production process, but in how he actively imagined and designed the way it would be received and read. It's also worth noting that this process is based on sophisticated digital labor. Instead of acquiring cheap images floating on the internet or purchasing stock images, Goo's production method of using ultra-high-resolution macro camera shots and rendering them with professional skill feels rather like intentional "craft."
While directing the computer program's interpolation and augmentation functions to create illusions of vivid texture and depth as images transform from flat to three-dimensional, from still to moving images, he simultaneously maintains the contradiction of controlling these results to prevent them from becoming typical images. According to the artist's shrewd intention, a small and subtle sense of foreignness seems sufficient to widen the narrow gap between what is shown and what is seen.
Before a convincing spectacle, our task is to find these subtle gaps and fake seams. We can either view the fragmentarily constructed screen as a sewn-together whole or train ourselves in a mechanical viewing angle that can appreciate it as is. We just need to remember that rendered images can be more dramatic than reality. If we remember that the artist's job is to intervene in the countless processes of contraction and expansion that occur in transferring images before our eyes, we can agree that the act of viewing is neither autonomous nor active.
I gaze at the exposed cross-section with multiple layers of vision. The series of landscapes created by Goo appear natural and concrete while simultaneously being artificial and ambiguous. Despite the remarkable verisimilitude that captures the retina, an unsettling ambiguity remains about what one has just seen. The essence of this feeling stems from slight crudeness nestled between seemingly smooth surfaces, a discomfort emanating from nature that isn't quite natural.
If the artificial sensibility that connects to nowhere in this world has been detected early on, there must have been a subtle error in Goo's calculations; if one felt nothing strange until the end, they might be somewhat insensitive. Or else, we must acknowledge the powerful fiction of images that have deeply permeated every joint of the world we live in. In this regard, it's necessary to examine the various points of fiction and error surrounding the work from multiple angles.
This is not so much to cross-verify the arguments described through the work thus far and the effects articulated through exhibitions, but because actively discovering and intentionally integrating the minute gaps embedded in digital images as a whole can enhance our resolution for viewing a world marked by the entangled images.
Meanwhile, we can consider the period around 2020 as the point when Goo's work began to gain attention domestically. Various experimental studies during his stay in Switzerland appear to have expanded visibly in both quantity and scale during the COVID period. Recalling how we encountered art and life in general through screens and communicated through images during this time, we discover the advantages of Goo's working method.
To simply understand his production method, he has been creating variations by specially photographing existing natural landscapes, digitally reconstructing and processing them, and presenting the results in formats ranging from prints and videos to mixed installations.
Looking at the series of natural landscapes that has continued steadily each year from a broader perspective, the individual works collectively form a world ("Gye" in Korean) that repeatedly reveals the difference between our schematized visual framework of the natural environment and reality. In modern society, where primitive nature and civilized individual bodies coexist, it is digital augmentation devices like cameras, prints, various projection equipment, and VR that most intimately mediate this gap or, conversely, widen it.
For Goo, who is accustomed to working at a computer all day, the connectivity between his working body and integrated devices, and conversely, the disconnection from the environment, are conditions of daily life. As mentioned earlier, there was a notable increase in image experiments and installation styles dealing with nature and plants during the COVID period.
This can be understood as an auteurist trend of contemplating non-human existence through various natural species and objects, naturally emerging based on interest in new materialism alongside Anthropocene discourse. While it might be valid to some extent to accept Goo's work as an example corresponding to these contemporary trends, we need to examine the issues in his work more pointedly.
What's important is not so much the amazement at digital sensibilities deeply infiltrated into today's human body and sensory organs, but rather how we can operate to examine without misinterpretation the image of the world that such sensibilities restructure, interpolate blank points autonomously, and recognize integrated parts through differentiation. It's about being deceived by visual illusions, actively accepting their obviousness at times, and partially filtering them.
The artist has consistently posited scenes, landscape, realm, and nature as spatial modules in his work titles, and by adding rhetoric such as Exceeded, Synthetic, and Macro before them, he has directly reflected that these are both portraits of today's nature and the reality of matter. The notion that exceeded nature can only be depicted through exceeded technology, and synthetic nature can only be shown through synthesis, seems honest in one sense yet feels like a broken solution somewhere.
The cross-sections of soil and earth, the breathing holes of moss and grass, and the vibrations of what appears to be microorganisms encountered through the work converge into an unfriendliness due to excessive detail, approaching as an excessive movement opposite to the vibrancy that life emanates. And these aspects constitute Goo's intended rendering method for how he gazes at and wishes to show the world.
However, countless artists have dealt with the complex relata surrounding nature, humans, and technology through various visual languages, and it remains one of the most crucial topics in today's socio-cultural discourse. Naturally, questions persist about where Goo's work stands in terms of its distinctiveness or uniqueness within this context, and about the true nature of visuality that defines our lives today.
If there is an interim conclusion that the artist has reached through their work by alternately connecting the axes of digital nature and digital (-ized) body, analog nature and analog body, it seems to be stating that their respective data and textures are interconnecting or overlapping somewhere in reality; ultimately in an indistinguishable state. And reaching this recognition has involved a kind of visual struggle. I'd like to call this process a form of artistic rendering.
Render, one of today's readily accessible terms, carries a comprehensive meaning of transforming something into another state. For instance, it refers to a performer's process of translating sheet music into music, the technology of processing raw materials into different forms (like solid to powder), and the process of integrating effects—shadows, colors, textures, etc.—in editing files to create final video output.
The world rendered collectively by Goo, his camera, and his computer programs markedly differs from reality, but let's consider whether this is problematic—or perhaps not—in today's world where images are becoming increasingly more expansive than reality.
While directions of direction, depths of depth, and intensities of intensity split and merge to create certain images within the artist's displayed screen, let's remember that in the world outside the screen, objects can be more distant than they appear, nature can be shallower than it sounds, and people can be lighter than they feel. This is because the screen is not a mirror image of the world.
The final authority to disassemble and re-render the unevenly rendered world's layers can only be oneself. That will be each person's mirror and way of rendering to control the world.
*Working as an independent curator, she creates diverse
exhibition programs and writes about art. Additionally, she
assists with public institutional agendas through corporate
and institutional consulting, outsourced research, and project
planning. Through her series of programs, she has maintained
a consistent interest in re-examining the formal characteristics
and narrative methods that exhibition media have preserved,
as well as in altering/dismantling certain ingrained aspects
in the process of producing and arranging artworks.