Ipkyu Jang, tangled timeline, 2024, Paints on aluminum plate, stainless steel pipe, watch parts, each 110x170x4cm, 112x170x4cm, 104x170x4cm © Ipkyu Jang

It has now become a classic, but in The Society of the Spectacle, the Situationist Guy Debord speaks of a reality more dramatic than fiction, a reality more cinematic than cinema. In his view, the world is a screen, and we are all actors appearing in television shows and films. In Simulation, Jean Baudrillard speaks of virtual reality that is more real than reality. He also said that we are all already living such virtual reality.

Here, simulation implies learning a sense of reality through virtual reality, practicing reality, and in itself suggests a reality in which reality and virtual reality have been reversed. In Videodrome, Cronenberg speaks of a fantasy that devours reality, in which the protagonist, chasing sexual fantasy, is eventually consumed by the fantasy created by desire. And in The Truman Show, the protagonist lives in virtual reality—actually a staged reality—without knowing that it is virtual reality.

In this way, all of us now live in an age of the cyber: cyborgs, cyber sex, cybernetics, cyber culture. We live in an age in which social networks embedded in our hands have replaced human relationships. We live in a paradoxical, strange, and uncanny world in which one maintains a stronger and friendlier relationship with an anonymous person one has never met in reality, while never once leaving one’s own room: a hikikomori communicating with all the others of the world.

We live in an anxious age in which we do not know who is a murderer, who is mentally ill, or who is a sex offender; in an extreme hyperreal age in which electronic games replace war, where no one can see or hear who has died, or what scream they gave as they died, and no one even cares.

We live in an age of impairment, in which too much information, too easily obtained, paradoxically destroys the capacity for comprehensive recognition; an age in which only fragmented recognition has become universal, a stitched-together recognition that edits and reconstructs fragmented recognition.

Ipkyu Jang’s installation work is meaningful precisely because it makes us face the feeling of an age that crosses the boundary between reality and virtual reality, and therefore perhaps the feeling of an impaired age. For instance, here is a clock. More precisely, there are clocks. It is an installation of clocks whose hands collide with one another, blocked from moving beyond that point, making ticking sounds. Unless their batteries run out, unless the plugs are pulled, the clocks will probably keep ticking stubbornly.

Then why did the artist make clocks that do not function properly in this way? He said the work expresses the temporality of the digital virtual world, which operates nonlinearly unlike reality, taking as its motif online experiences felt as if one were jumping about without narrative continuity. It likely refers to hypertext, which may begin anywhere and end anywhere, and to hyperlinks, which connect by moving around without logical probability.

It may refer to the nonlinear temporality of hypertext and the discontinuous spatial movement of hyperlinks. Coincidentally, Gilles Deleuze once proposed, through schizoanalysis, such a mode lacking logical probability as a positive practical logic for breaking through conventional institutional inertia based on logical probability.

He might have seen, in these clocks that look impaired or abnormal, the possibility of time flowing differently: time that may stop on the way, move backward, or skip ahead; time that acquires logical probability in another way; a practical possibility in which existing logic is redefined.

If the work using clocks deals with a nonlinear concept of time, another work deals with discontinuous spatial experience. Fragments of rooms such as living rooms or bedrooms, where furniture, appliances, household items, and everyday objects are arranged as they are in daily life, appear to have been cut into pieces with a ruler and knife and scattered throughout the exhibition space like floating islands.

Wheels are attached beneath the fragmented structures, making it a variable installation that can be freely moved and installed. Yoko Ono once proposed a half-room in order to satirize a severed world, a world without communication, but why does this artist propose a fragmented room? He said the work brings the concept of time and space in the digital virtual world into physical real space, taking edited images floating online as its motif, and reinterpreting and visualizing digital images through analog means.

It may be an attempt to summon virtual reality trapped within the frame of a blue monitor onto reality, and thus to defamiliarize it. It may also be a work that reminds us that virtual reality summoned onto reality is also changing people’s perception of reality.

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