Installation view of 《Palindrome》 (Incheon Art Platform, 2023) ©Incheon Art Platform

As part of its residency program, Incheon Art Platform runs the “Creation–Production Project,” which supports the creative activities of resident artists. For the first project in the visual arts category in 2023, the platform presents resident artist JSUK HAN’s solo exhibition 《Palindrome》.

HAN has worked consistently with sound installation around the themes of “noise” and “feedback.” In particular, “feedback” functions for the artist as a system that generates the work itself, with the artist performing roles within that system. Literally interpreted as “feeding (back) what has been fed,” feedback refers to a looped algorithm in which an output produced by a system is re-introduced as the system’s input.

From this form, the artist recalls Uroboros, the monster from Greek mythology and a symbol in medieval alchemy: a serpent or dragon that bites its own tail, signifying infinite recurrence, the hermaphrodite/intersex, immortality, and the “primordial matrix.” Within the feedback system—an endless relation of eating and being eaten—HAN captures the moment when the head simply radiates toward the tail and the order of front and back loses its meaning.

The exhibition title “Palindrome” refers to words, numbers, or strings that read the same forward and backward—like “rotator” or “2023202.” For the artist, however, palindrome is not limited to mirrored strings; it expands into a more three-dimensional concept that encompasses up and down, input and output, forward and reverse playback, plus and minus, black and white. As Tilde Bjorfors, artistic director and founder of Sweden’s renowned circus company Cirkus Cirkör, has said about tightrope walking: “Balance is not being caught between this and that. It is movement between black and white, not gray.” For HAN, the idea of palindrome resembles this ceaseless pendular motion between binary states. Within such a system, dichotomous boundaries become blurred.

Through this exhibition, the artist probes palindromic structures and discovers links to nature, where cycles of generation, proliferation, and extinction repeat without end. HAN seeks to model non-linear phenomena in the natural world using feedback systems. Just as one cannot decisively locate a starting point in the rising and setting of the sun, the exhibition invites audiences to be enveloped by continuously circulating, vibrating sound and to experience a palindromic moment in which beginnings and endings become indistinct.

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