“Why do so many new abstractions look the same?”– Jerry Saltz, 2014
 
Zombie Formalism, which gained traction in the early to mid-2010s, is often characterized as the convergence of past visual and auditory imagery within the “here and now.”

At the time, that “here and now” was synonymous with a sense of emptiness. It was the prevailing perception that we, as users, had exhausted everything—content included—and thus were incapable of generating anything truly “new.” This pervasive pessimism inevitably led to a fixation on the past. The past became a kind of archive, a repository to counterbalance the void.

However, Zombie Formalism was not necessarily about cannibalizing all the images embedded within that archive. Rather, images derived from the past were reconstructed—by certain artists—to resonate with the prevailing sense of emptiness, and through that process, they came to embody a certain order, ultimately represented by form.

So, what is the logic—or order—of an image that corresponds to emptiness? That, in itself, is a paradoxical question. In a state of emptiness—where nothing exists—order is meaningless. Thus, images sourced from the past must intervene in that void while simultaneously generating a self-sufficient order. Whether it was mere nostalgia or unconscious reference to specific past forms, strategies to colonize emptiness abounded during that time.

The problem was that these strategies became so prolific that they failed to produce any shared resolution to the emptiness we faced. As Nicolas Bourriaud once argued, the past did not become a new topography of imagery through postproduction by multiple users; instead, arbitrarily selected images crisscrossed with no coherent logic, ultimately resulting in a spatiotemporal fragmentation.

That fragmentation is precisely what defines the form of emptiness. Emptiness, paradoxically, colonized the past. And that fact was quickly forgotten. Or rather, attempts to trace the genealogy of these arbitrary image intersections were indefinitely deferred. Under the guise of remix, the past was left mutilated and abandoned. No meaningful constellations driven by emptiness remain.

Eventually, everything—including the past—was reduced to rootless data, haphazardly mashed together by the inertia of remix culture, giving rise to what is now called Crapstraction. Crapstraction is not Zombie Formalism itself but the landscape that emerged in its aftermath.

It is from this point that Jihyoung Han’s practice unfolds. In particular, the geometric compositions prominent in some of her paintings seem to freeze the momentum of Crapstraction in a chilling manner. By rigorously demarcating the residual data that would otherwise dissolve into Crapstraction, her works finally present the viewer with an “image” that can be objectified.

This is not so much a painterly experiment as it is an effort to re-contextualize our currently abstracted world through painting as a medium. For the artist, painting is not the spoils of a past already colonized by emptiness—it is a means of gathering the future after Crapstraction into the “here and now.”

In this exhibition, painting becomes a medium of transformation—not content to dwell in the lineage of “cold abstraction,” but boldly attempting metamorphosis.

For instance, the once-painterly geometric compositions begin to splinter, negotiating with the underlying flow of Crapstraction. Time, enmeshed and congealed at the data level, leaks into the image, causing the spatial territories within it to dissolve instantaneously.

Yet the artist is not overwhelmed by this self-imposed chaos. On the contrary, she presents it as a new futurist declaration—something still possible in the here and now.

This new futurism considers today’s abstract world an organism to be tuned using the vast toolbox provided by digital technologies. This organism encompasses the past we’ve hacked to pieces, the hollow slogans crafted to sell it, the consumerist strategies that follow, and the political contentions orbiting the past as a gravitational center—until it all forgets itself.

Thus, the past no longer exists.

What remains is the form of an organism, or an amorphous image that corresponds to it. Yet this does not plunge us back into collective pessimism. Rather, the amorphous image becomes an allegory of the post-human—a figure submerged in the phase of Crapstraction—cleansing all remaining physical and non-physical relations in the abstract world.

In doing so, it dilutes modern subjectivity, flipping subject into object and vice versa, transcending gender binaries, and forming new commons for disparate consciousnesses and ideologies.

This allegory hints at the infinite potential of a future that the artist has summoned—deliberately—into the present. The image, therefore, is now capable of becoming anything.

In this exhibition, the viewer is invited to contemplate these potential metamorphoses, resolving the allegory in their own way. In that sense, this new futurism does not dwell on the gaps of the past, nor does it prematurely define the future.

Instead, it simply realizes the world as an organism—a world the artist declares and manifests through the image.

References

• [비평] 공허 이후의 세계 – 한지형 개인전 《Fatty Folders》 (드로잉룸, 2022)
  [Critique] The World after Emptiness – Jihyoung Han Solo Exhibition 《Fatty Folders》 (drawingRoom, 2022))