Installation view of 《Your happiness can’t even make screen blue》 (space xx, 2023) © Ipkyu Jang

At times, one wonders whether images on a digital screen should be perceived as reality or as virtual reality. Does an image in actual reality exist as something imitated by the virtual, or does it contain the paradox that the virtual proves the existence of the real by appearing?

Today, when much of our lives has been transferred into digital systems and considerable energy is spent on building and using them, artist Ipkyu Jang instead adopts an analog method as his methodology, translating the processes of the digital environment into physical form. His work is grounded in our attitudes toward consuming and engaging with digital images and technologies today, and this attitude is condensed in the title of this solo exhibition, 《Your Happiness Can’t Even Make Screen Blue》.

The title borrows from the essay title Your Pain Cannot Make Even One Leaf Green by poet Lee Seong-bok (1952–), metaphorically and paradoxically expressing our excessive dependence on digital media by comparing it to the confusion or depression we feel when order breaks down in a digital environment.

《Your Happiness Can’t Even Make Screen Blue》 focuses on the subjectivity of today’s digital systems, the meaning of the original obtained when digital virtuality and the real world are overturned, and the artist’s attitude of translating digital grammar into a labor-intensive working method in physical space. In doing so, the exhibition examines the points and intervals where fundamental yet meaningful questions arise.

Ipkyu Jang’s work dismantles objects, materializes signified images, and proves presence through absence. If his previous works created another original independent from the original meaning and context of objects by discovering and collecting discarded things and putting them through the digital editing processes of cut and paste, his recent work maintains the same method of using digital editing processes while expanding toward the emergence of reality imitating the digital, mediated by immaterial subjects such as digital systems, images, and grammar.

《Your Happiness Can’t Even Make Screen Blue》 centers on this expansion of the artist’s objects of inquiry and concepts, presenting works that seek another direction while adapting to an environment in which it has become increasingly difficult to collect desired discarded objects, as well as to the rapid influx of digital technologies and media.

In doing so, the artist expands his existing methodology by introducing digital mechanisms, concretizing the correlation between digital virtuality and the real world and revealing its substance. timeline(clock)(2021), which reinterprets the timeline bar of digital video editing programs through analog means, reconstructs the process of cutting and pasting time as analog clocks, presenting a strange sculptural form as a coordinate of the present.

Within a screen containing masses of different times, the hour, minute, and second hands rotate at their own speeds, while the collisions and stoppages of clock hands generated by irregular intervals metaphorically express the gap and conflict between digital and analog. A gap also arises in the visual perception of the volume of digital images.

study of layers(2022) focuses on the point at which images dismantled and recombined through digital editing appear as flat, thin results without spatial depth, despite having passed through many stages. Simulating the digital editing process by cutting, attaching, and stacking layers of objects in real space, the work allows viewers to physically sense layers and thickness.

Reflecting a sculptural interpretation that borrows digital grammar, it produces visual-perceptual gaps depending on the viewing angle. Noting that most icons used in digital and internet programs derive from designs based on real-world objects or natural images, the artist experiments with materializing them, making visible the dialectical transformation of objects according to the positions they occupy.

modern tools(2023) recreates tools frequently used in programs such as Photoshop or Illustrator, revealing images or tools that are useful in digital environments but unusable in reality as solidly shaped objects. These objects, having lost their use and retaining only symbolic meaning, emphasize the fictionality of substance as they are repeatedly translated from reality to virtuality and back to reality.

In the related work visible and invisible(2022), irony emerges as the artist moves beyond the limitation that digital icons merely imitate reality, discovers signs newly generated within the digital environment itself, and physically reproduces them in order to search for their purpose and utility in reality. In addition, blockchain(2023), which fully contains the artist’s perspective on the recent NFT craze, visualizes blockchain technology, which certifies ownership of digital assets, literally as block + chain.

The work satirizes the meaning and value of originality in artworks as well as the indiscriminate consumption of the digital market. This series of works shares the fact that it passes through complex, multilayered stages. In the process, the artist discovers gaps between digital and analog, which in turn transform dialectically and seek points of intersection between the two.

The results obtained through the performance of numerous processes ultimately acquire the smooth finish characteristic of digital images and appropriate new value. The seemingly useless object becomes another original with its own narrative, twisting the essence of technology in the digital age and solidifying its validity as an artwork.

In his book Non-things, Byung-Chul Han (1959–) states that “there is no narrative continuity in digital time, which makes life fleeting,” diagnosing the present condition of dematerialization from a critical perspective. Jang goes against the current age that converts analog into digital, spending considerable time and labor to bring digital mechanisms without narrative continuity into the real world and to create absent narratives and values.

The process is firmly imbued with hardship generated by the artist himself, yet through this laborious work, digital virtuality and actual space are presented not as fragmented and separated, but as a kind of relationship with a common denominator. At the intersection where the two meet, a new narrative can arise as another possibility.

As we encounter the works in 《Your Happiness Can’t Even Make Screen Blue》, we are invited to step deeply into the substance of the sharp yet witty new narrative the artist has created. We are also invited to objectify our attitude toward that substance and reflect on how our perception and senses are being reorganized during this transitional period into the digital age.

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