Hyejin Jo is an intent observer of the shared ways of life we encounter from day to day and the cultural codes that prevail in contemporary times, focusing in particular on objects that reflect these phenomena. She explores practices of producing and consuming objects amid society’s demands. In some cases, she examines the ways in which members of society use, adapt, and interpret certain objects, using this as a basis for her own uniquely sculptural approach to contemplation. In her past work, she investigated utility model registration documents as a form of industrial intellectual property rights, while using her sculpture to represent and supplement the formal possibilities of objects that have been gradually improved and advanced to meet social demands. In various contexts, she has considered the origins of socially approved forms within the currents that lead to technological texts, ideas, and shapes (Create New; documents, Artspace Hue, Seoul, 2017). She has probed the situations and contexts behind the functioning of images whose repeated replications and transformations within the everyday market of free consumption have divorced them from their original forms and sources—mapping in the process the new social and cultural topographies discovered amid the cycles of distribution and consumption (Vector Project, 2016; Functional Form, 2016). Often, the routes followed by these objects visualize society’s invisible underlying communities, as shown more starkly in the Migrating Typeface project (2018–). For this, Jo administered a questionnaire to 35 foreign residents of Korea from 11 countries, using their Korean handwriting samples to develop 530 typefaces (including numbers and symbols) that she subsequently distributed for free online. The fonts here assume an aesthetic quality as they are repurposed as objects of artistic appreciation, yet they also become a mechanism for establishing a language and place for the participants in ways that do not harm their individual identities as foreigners.

In Shadow Beyond the Window, Hyejin Cho focuses on the images that are circulated, consumed, and distributed on online platforms. Poring through consumer photographs of particular products that were posted online, she archives images that she discovers through searches related to the items in question. Contained in that mass of images are shared behavioral patterns, where the artist discovers the unique ways that objects have occupied people’s spaces and imagines certain narratives. Yet the images that appear on the digital screen are of objects without bodies. There is no material way of being, no human memory of handling them. The small, thin screen cuts between us and the object like a barrier that can never be bridged. Reliant on digital images, the objects appear and disappear like disembodied phantoms, and it becomes impossible to shape a narrative from these fragmented presences, which appear more akin to integral information. It has been argued that the “core of story and memories lies in narrative continuity across a long timeframe.” In this way, the digital order is one in which images merely stage fragmented lives absent of memories.

While the images on today’s digital platforms may seem to be intended for others, they simply repeat disposable moments within self-exhausting mechanisms. Between transparent images and opaque narratives, Hyejin Jo imagines contact between the self and other—by adding flesh to the flat objects on the screen, and by situating them in space as present materials with transplanted skin. In her series Windows (2024), the transparent air surrounding the untouchable objects in images is transformed into a translucent curtain. Here, the artist is focusing on the clear structures (windows) that define the inner and outer boundaries of our everyday spaces like studios and living rooms. They have the effect of drawing the outdoor landscape indoors—but they are frames where we cannot imagine what lies beyond the frame outside the gaze. They are also transparent yet solid barriers that isolate the interior environment and its peaceful order from an ever-changing outside world. The translucent rendering of this clear image represents what lies outside the windows that Jo has encountered in her life. Unlike the inner environments, it is not fully controllable; these outer landscapes vary with their conditions, containing screens that shape narratives and lives in continuing ways as places where past moments accumulate. The landscapes beyond the windows are continua of accumulating time, and they are also spaces with depth, serving as translucent backdrops that transparently visualize a certain narrative quality.

At the same time, the images faintly appearing over the barriers serve a role of visual distortion and obscuring. By concealing parts of the image underneath while revealing others, they turn the object beyond into something opaque. When confronted with a barrier whose lack of transparency elicits a desire to know that identity, the gaze shifts to deeper places, and the body begins moving along with it. Yet what it finds at the end are only the original ambiguous shapes and indefinable landscapes. Fragmented, indiscernible forms (On the Surface of Contact series, 2024) are based on image search data that were originally categorized by object names. Here, Hyejin Jo explores the unique ways in which objects have been employed by individual users and their distinctive ways of existing in those users’ spaces. From those images, she extracts the items alone, assigning them sculptural bodies. Along similar lines, the artist also shares landscape drawings (Blurry and Close series, 2024). The images, however, are either faint and foggy or contain only “typical” landscapes. Because of that typicality and opacity, we end up losing the spatial aspect of these scenes: where time, narrative, and incident are absent from a place, it is reduced to an image without identity, subordinated to language and form. By deliberately incorporating unidentifiable images, Jo evokes the ways in which objects exist when they lose the individuality beyond that. Indeed, these opaque objects—these images without narrative, seemingly private yet lacking in intimacy—clearly evoke the opaque, non-narrative nature of images today.

Another fascinating aspect here is the way that Jo reconstructs objects within material contexts in ways that imbue scattered images with a tactile sense. Objects today have been replaced with digitalized information, losing their inherent value and meaning in the process. The sensory experience of objects has been fading away, transmuting into indirect, superficial experiences through digital media. Hyejin Jo introduces a sense of tactility to these object-images that provide immediate satisfaction with responses that are restricted to the visual level. By “sense of tactility,” I mean that she situates them in a real-world realm rather than that of data. Through their material translation, the objects gain a physicality that they did not possess before—from the artistic gestures that could also be detected in Windows’s opaque images, from the marks of the sculptor’s hands on the material, or from the very textures of technologically shaped materials. This served to introduce an aspect of reality to the narrative possibilities beyond the surface-level visuality, inducing profound interactions between object and existence.

This era’s images appear with a sense of sleekness, constantly sharing a present-tense sense while sacrificing the possibility of story. There are no shared narratives layered there; there is no depth of memory. Hyejin Jo explores shared ways of being by restoring the object nature lost in today’s digital media and screens, weaving together a narrative sense as splintered images and moments are assembled in one place. She expands images into vibrant imaginary narratives that had not been accessible before between material self-awareness and intangible form. These become something deeply individual and original; at times, they expand into shared stories in terms of connections and intersections among multitudes. Here, the object becomes more than a mere “thing”—it is a medium closely tied to human existence. One person’s timeframe connects with another’s, one place with a different one, and everyday narratives begin to emerge.

Credit

Participating artists : JO Hyejin
Curated by KIM Sung woo
Text by KIM Sung woo
Design by GANG Moonsick
Installation technician : Mujindongsa
Photo by CJY ART STUDIO (CHO Junyong)

Supported by Arts Council Korea, 2024 ARKO Selection Visual Art