With his work ‘Highway Epigram’, Jaehun Park employs 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 a 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.