Jaehun Park 'Highway Epigram' 2022
Jaehun Park is showing simulated video works at Unbound. His works are created using 3D scanning technology to translate physical substances into virtual substances, such as polygon structures and point cloud systems (a set of data points in space). He uses hyper-realistic 3D rendering to stage mass-produced objects – as vessels of capitalist ideology – in a desolate digital space or to situate them in ‘ritualistic’ installations depicting impossible natural phenomena. His virtual works address current problematic events on Earth by zooming in on cleverly chosen metaphors and objects.
With his new work ‘Highway Epigram’, Jaehun Park employed 3D scanning data such as point cloud and photogrammetry technology to depict the reality of our world. ‘Highway Epigram’ offers a piercing look at the current world we live in, including the war in Ukraine, hyperinflation, the cryptocurrency bubble economy, the oil crisis, the Trump wall (and the Mexican border), the threat of World War III, and so on. The fundamental question that emerges from this work is, “Are economic growth and our progress the same?” For this video, he explores the sensation of speed with the aid of road signs and infrastructures on motorways, explosions of buildings, oil pumps and drilling machines, Nordstream gas pipelines, etc. Driving in a car on the motorway, we don’t feel the actual speed of our body in motion. However, should the car crash, our body is unable to handle the sheer force of acceleration and will end up destroyed. Within a few years, Tesla’s autonomous driving vehicle will be a dominant feature on the motorway. Park uses the metaphor of the motorway, as an allegory of the fragmented objects and simulation of point cloud particles from the detonated building, to reveal the world laid bare. Abstract brushstrokes rendered in 3D space derive from the trajectory of fragments of a collision.
With his simulation algorithms, manipulated and staged virtual landscapes and installations, he reveals the tip of the real world – oversaturated by hideous and glorious moments of capitalism. Desire, vanity, guilt, irrationality and debt become resources in the ‘ritual’ space of capitalism. The concept of hell manifests itself not after death, but here in this diabolical reality.
Jaehun Park (1986, South Korea) lives and works in Amsterdam and Seoul. Graduated from the Department of Painting(BFA, MFA) at Seoul National University and Master Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. Recent exhibitions include Topographic Atlas, JAN Museum, Amstelveen (2022), Art and Peace: Let us begin again from zero o’clock, Ulsan Art Museum, Ulsan (2022), Ritual for the Night, Bradwolff Projects, Amsterdam (2022), Alternative Space Loop Seoul (2021), Sign Project Space Groningen (2021) and Photo Basel (2021). His work is part of several collections including Amstelveen Municipal Art Collection, Normec Art Collection, The Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Korea Institute for Advanced Study and the Seoul National University Health Service Center.