Poster image of 《Under the Paradise》 © Paradise ZIP

The exhibition project "ZIP UP," launched for the first time by the Paradise Cultural Foundation, aims to foster artistic production across the visual arts by developing diverse cultural and artistic content, supporting emerging artists, and broadening opportunities for public engagement with contemporary art.

This exhibition presents the work of Jaiyoung Cho, the artist selected for the 2017 edition of "ZIP UP." Under the title 《Under the Paradise》, the exhibition questions the hierarchical structures embedded within existing systems of perception. "It poses questions about all that secretly exists beneath the paradise we aspire to, and everything we believe in, expect, and pursue. What is our true paradise? What should it become?"

Jaiyoung Cho's work explores invisible principles and their visible manifestations. These principles, however, are subtly altered, displaced from the present, or gently destabilized. They are described as "subtle" because their outward appearances function as symptomatic traces of deeper instabilities within the governing order.

The objects she creates inhabit the narrow threshold between what is considered "normal" and what is on the verge of disappearance. They belong to an unstable and interchangeable world that exists just before reality loses its resolution and dissolves into geometric forms, or before matter returns to its primordial, alchemical state.

In 《Under the Paradise》, Cho examines what may have existed prior to the realization of an ideal world. The process of arriving at perfection may be understood as everything that remains once ideality has been subtracted from the world. It is precisely this subtraction that casts the world into a state of uncertainty.

Language loses its objects, things become immobilized, relationships repeatedly derail, and consciousness remains suspended in confusion. Yet through the artist's perspective, this subtraction also becomes the catalyst for new beginnings and recurring cycles, for endlessly returning moments and leaps toward other dimensions.

Paradise may be meaningful precisely because it remains "over there" or "above." Its absence generates within our world both the desire and the direction to move toward the place it once occupied. How might the surfaces that come into contact with paradise be formed?

They will emerge in forms we have never before encountered, revealing themselves as unprecedented configurations that continually challenge the limits of our language and consciousness.

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