Gallery
Purple presents 《Trailer》, a solo exhibition by Ahram Kwon, from April 11 (Friday) to May 24
(Saturday), 2025.
《Trailer》 refers to an object that carries
something and moves somewhere—implying mobility or the state of linking scenes
and facilitating transitions. Through this solo exhibition, her first in four
years, Kwon offers a comprehensive overview of both her past and recent works,
providing an opportunity to reflect on her artistic trajectory and future
directions.
Ahram
Kwon has expressed a critical skepticism toward the digital world, creating
media installation works that metaphorically and symbolically explore media
ecologies. Her early works engaged deeply with structures of the body and
language, while the flat-〉 series examined the complex and organic relationships
between media and human thought and behavior. Particularly, Walls,
a key turning point in her practice, visually unraveled through media
installation how screens in capitalist society no longer merely serve as image
carriers but rather as mediators where circulating desires operate.
The
representative flat-〉
series focuses on how digital screens flatten reality into images and how
viewers consume and articulate these images through their linguistic and
cognitive habits. While the body exists in the real world, cognition remains
displaced within the invisible digital realm, creating a sense of dislocation.
To visualize how media shapes human thought and behavior, Kwon employs screens
and mirrors. The combination of these elements intersects fictional spaces and
illusory images expanded beyond the digital screen, symbolically exposing
desire images packaged like commodities. The colors appearing on the screens
reference the "Blue Screen of Death," which the artist explains stems
from an accidental color selection by developers that eventually became the
designated color for digital errors—an occurrence she associates with the art
world’s conceptual turn. Through this, she encourages viewers to question how
digital images contain distorted information or personal desires, ultimately leading
to a reconsideration of media’s political nature.
Along
with her reflections on surrounding subjects, Kwon also pays close attention to
their material forms. The Freeze Frame series, inspired by
the technical process of freezing video frames, reconstructs screen images into
sculptural formats, transforming floating images into materialized objects. The
term "frame," which refers to the 1/30 second units in video, acquires
materiality through flat images and mirrors, attempting a medium conversion.
This act transforms video media into frozen sculpture or materialized
"frames," offering Kwon’s own reinterpretation of the "freeze
frame" technique.
Double
Wall self-reflectively depicts the modern individual repeatedly
crossing digital platforms and channels in techno-capitalism, where
information, commodities, technology, and capital are tightly intertwined, like
a screen functioning as a mechanical wall filled with subliminal effects.
Viewers are confronted with situations in which they cannot fully immerse
themselves in the information, instead being forced to face both media and
their own selves. This allows for reflection on the boundaries between digital
media and the self as they exist in daily life.
In
this exhibition, 《Trailer》, Kwon explores how media transforms human experience and sensation,
and how human existence and society interact within these processes. The
exhibition invites viewers to traverse the boundary between fiction and truth
produced by media and to newly explore the internal and external worlds formed
between themselves and media.
