JSUK HAN, Constellate, 2021, Second-hand speakers, metal rods, electric components, Dimensions variable ©OCI Museum of Art

“Feedback” is a familiar term—often translated literally as “feeding back.” It denotes “a response to a provisional result,” or a mode of operation in which output is returned as input and results are reinserted as material. Leading audiences—perhaps weary from insufficient feedback in both work and daily life—into a world of infinite feedback, JSUK HAN’s solo exhibition 《Feedbacker: Ambiguous Borderer》 ran from June 17 to July 10 at the OCI Museum of Art (Director: Jihyun Lee), Jongno-gu.

As the first in the 2021 OCI YOUNG CREATIVES solo-exhibition series—featuring six selected emerging artists over three months—HAN applies feedback principles across devices such as speakers, TVs, projectors, and smartphone cameras, presenting varied modes of operation.

Speakers vibrate, agitating air to transmit sound. In Constellate, whenever the speaker’s black, round diaphragm trembles, a roughly one-meter copper-colored metal rod planted at its center dances up, down, left, and right. The rod’s tip nearly touches another rod hanging from the ceiling. In a fleeting moment stirred by a passerby’s breath or footsteps, the tips meet; a tiny spark leaps, current flows along the rod, and the speaker activates. The diaphragm vibrates again, the rods part, the current breaks, and the speaker stops. As the wavering tips bide their time in the subsiding vibration, they seek reunion.


JSUK HAN, Live Feedback, 2021, Smartphone, projector, PC, Dimensions variable ©OCI Museum of Art

In Live Feedback, a camera streams the gallery’s live view to social media in real time, and the corresponding web page is projected onto the gallery wall. The camera captures this scene again, uploads it once more, and the postings repeat. At a glance, one might imagine an eternity of “input, output, and re-input.” Yet the loop never becomes absolute: each digital device operates with its own algorithms and physical bandwidth limits. Entangled together, at certain stages the feedback loop converges or oscillates toward outcomes that defy prediction. There is, in effect, a “threshold.” An audience member encounters this “non-balance of balance”—a system that at times stiffens or vibrates. A casual hand wave, that small “ripple,” can break the balance and generate a new infinity.

In Encounter, a camcorder films a TV monitor lying on the floor and transmits the footage; the transmitted image is then played back on that same TV; and the resulting screen becomes the camera’s subject again. Using each other as source, the devices create layered interactions that cannot be explained solely by digital or analog traits. Between the devices’ “logical circuits” and their “physical actions,” content and form swap roles and interpenetrate.

A special feature of the exhibition is When a Thud, a World Sways, a collaboration with artist Eunbyul Jeong, whose solo show ran concurrently on the first floor. In the main lobby, HAN’s speaker works display Jeong’s “swaying paintings” mounted where metal rods would usually stand. The relatively consistent rods are replaced by more varied forms arranged with greater irregularity; overhead, rods suspended on the second floor intertwine like a mobile rather than simple vertical lines. Each time rod tips touch, diaphragms tremble on more uneven cycles, and the mobile-like rods set neighboring rods in motion. What began as a sequence of independent channels between two agents expands into a large, integrated channel in which agents can no longer be clearly delimited. In feedback, a single small variable can trigger unexpected developments—best witnessed on site.

As the title suggests, the repetition of feedback leads to mixtures of transmission and reception, digital and analog, artificial and natural, finite and infinite, form and content. The suffix “-er,” which marks an agent, implies that after the feedback system is designed, every factor—including the artworks themselves—can act as a feedbacker in its own right. In other words, this is an exhibition in which everyone becomes a protagonist.

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