Jinseung Jang studied Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, and received his Master’s degree in Painting from Hongik University Graduate School. He currently lives and works in Seoul.
Jinseung Jang (b. 1991) explores the
relationship between technology and humanity and the structures of social
perception, unfolding narratives that cut across past, present, and future
societies through a variety of media. In particular, his practice is concerned
with the biases and discrimination inherent in human existence, as well as the
potential for mutual understanding that can overcome them.
To this end, he experiments with
visualization of digital and analog data, audiovisual archival systems, video,
and installation, probing the perceptual and cognitive structures of humanity
that may emerge in the near future.
While studying abroad in London, Jinseung
Jang encountered issues of racial discrimination, which led him to take an
interest in social perception and inequality. Against this backdrop, he began
his series ‘DATA, POLAROIDS’ (2012–), an archival project documenting portraits
of various individuals captured on Polaroid film with their eyes closed.
In this work, Jang instructed his subjects
to close their eyes as a way of breaking free from the habitual gestures people
tend to perform when placed within the photographic frame—such as smiling or
making a peace sign—gestures that are unconscious and standardized.
Within the shared frame, when these
unconscious actions are suspended and the resulting images are gathered
together, the individuals—each with distinct sociocultural backgrounds—emerge
beyond categories such as race or gender, revealing themselves instead as
presences within the broader context of “humanity.”
The artist explains that this work was
created with the intention of “erasing individual identities and amplifying the
similarities shared by all of humanity, thereby symbolically removing the
layers of prejudice and discrimination.”
Building upon this context, Jang produced
Face De-Perception (2017), a work that employs facial
detection technology to translate human facial features into dots and lines,
effectively stripping away their distinctive traits. The piece originated from
Jang’s questioning of a facial recognition system developed by a company called
Faception.
This system collected and stored the facial
data of criminals in a database, then offered a service that detected potential
terrorists based on that data. Jang began this work with the critical question
of whether such a system—one that recognizes and classifies people solely on
the basis of their face, their outward appearance—can truly be considered a
system for the future.
Accordingly, the artist employed not a
facial recognition system—which detects individual characteristics in order to
identify specific persons—but rather a facial detection system that calculates
the average points of a human face and represents them through dots and lines.
He first used a Kinect camera to detect faces and store the original
black-and-white data as a first step. From this, he calculated the distances
among facial elements such as the eyes, nose, and mouth, then summed and
divided all these values to derive and archive an “average value” of the face.
This average value continues to change
depending on the viewer’s position in front of the screen, while the values of
various partial data throughout the process are also stored in real time.
By patternizing people’s appearances in a
visual and physical manner, this work prompts a reconsideration of biases and
recognitions toward differences, and proposes a new way of perceiving one
another through objective data.
Installation view
of 《OLIGOPTICON》 (Space:illi, 2020) ©Jinseung
JangIn this series of works, while Jinseung
Jang focused on eliminating the individual elements of the face, his first solo
exhibition 《OLIGOPTICON》 (2020)
shifted attention to the very methods of data collection, the connections and
interlinkages within the “data archive structures” that emerge from it, and
experiments concerning human recognition systems.
For instance, the work Data
Cabinet (2020) is a kind of “data repository” designed to collect
digital data of facial groups. This work archives the processes of data
collection and transformation, aimed at re-dividing the data layers from his
earlier work Face De-Perception and facilitating interaction
among the data.
The cabinet, composed of four layers,
contains collected data corresponding to four different faces. Here, the facial
data are preserved in physical form through two 3.5-inch displays, a speaker,
and 3D printing.
The first display shows the process of
collecting average facial data, while the second presents a visual output that
converts this averaged data into oscilloscope signals. The speaker plays an
audio rendering of the same dataset, and the 3D-printed facial groupings serve
as one of the experimental results exploring how digital data, stored as planar
numerical values, can be reconstructed into analog form.
This work can be understood both as an
extension of Jang’s earlier attempts to dismantle the prejudice layers embedded
within human recognition structures, and as an exploration of the possibilities
of “data interaction” centered on the human face.
Jinseung Jang,
C-MP-MUTATIONEM(L-85-17-J), 2020, Film series, color,
sound(stereo) ©Jinseung JangMeanwhile, the three-part video series ‘Decennium
Series’ (2020), created in collaboration with visual artist Eunhee Lee,
addresses social issues and debates concerning imagined future societies by
layering futuristic narratives atop contemporary technological phenomena. Each
of the three videos, themed around the keywords “race,” “labor,” and
“education,” unfolds through a sci-fi framework to depict the future narratives
of techno-science.
The first episode,
C-MP-MUTATIONEM(L-85-17-J), depicts humanity in 2030, when a
biotechnological technology that alters skin color is invented, unintentionally
eliminating existing racial discrimination and ushering in a new phase for human
society. The second episode, BEFORE TERMINATION, portrays a
“remote substitute driver” navigating ethical conflicts within society and
corporations in a world where taxis have disappeared and platform capitalism
and machine-ecological systems have been reinforced.
The final episode, THE FIRST
KID, envisions a future society in which children, immediately after
birth, are assessed by a data-driven predictive system to determine which
traits will develop more or be specialized. Through these three videos, the
series’ science-fictional imagination oscillates between reality and unreality,
provoking serious reflection on the near future.
The following year, Deluded
Reality (2021) was also produced based on the artist’s sci-fi
imagination, exploring cognitive experiences at the point where the boundary
between virtuality and reality becomes blurred, conceptualized as a “deluded
reality.” The video depicts a digital game character acquiring a sense of space
and time, through which it comes to recognize the boundary between the virtual
and the real.
Within this framework, the character
becomes aware of its position and existence within the graphically constructed
world, even experiencing sensations that transcend the given space and time.
The video concludes with scenes beyond the glass of a laboratory-like setting,
where “other selves” create beings resembling “him” in another dimension.
Furthermore, in his 2022 solo exhibition 《L·A·P·S·E》 at CR Collective, Jinseung Jang
presented a post-humane worldview in which the boundaries between virtual and
real, as well as the linear arrangement of space and time, are deconstructed.
The artist borrowed concepts from filming
techniques such as time-lapse, hyper-lapse, and slow motion, which manipulate
the linear sequence of time by arbitrarily shortening or lengthening it.
Through these techniques, he sought to experiment with simulations of what
might occur in the flow, expansion, or contraction of the interval between two
points in space-time.
The robot prototype in L·A·P·S·E
is a humanoid that has separate bone and skin which imitates the human skeleton
and its tissue structure. Jang names a humanoid or a particle that makes up a
virtual space as an “AI particle” and establishes a virtual time and space
created by AI particles, assuming that they eventually will exist as
themselves, move on their own, and even have free will, like humans.
However, in this space and time, there are
unknown strangeness that push away the sense of reality or objects that imitate
the human body but cannot fully reproduce natural human movements while
overcoming some of the human body’s limitations. Additionally, the characters,
robots, and fox-like creatures in the video are not strictly categorized as
either living or non-living beings.
In the video, these entities are not
autonomous beings with instincts and senses like humans, capable of
self-determined action. Instead, they operate through processes that output
responses based on input values. Yet gradually, they enter a stage where they
begin to question or reflect on the tasks assigned to them. In particular, the
robots face situations in which their given roles become increasingly
burdensome and the boundaries of their duties blur into meaninglessness,
prompting them to question the mechanical execution of their tasks.
Within this framework, neither fully real
nor fully living beings appear. However, by depicting an intermediate
hybridity—where layers of space-time, humans, and robots overlap without fully
merging—the work encourages reflection on the point at which anthropocentrism
is deconstructed.
In this way, Jinseung Jang presents
simulations in which reality and imagination are ambiguously
intertwined—appearing real yet not entirely real—amid the increasingly blurred
boundary between virtual and physical worlds caused by accelerated technological
development. His work invites reflection on the perception and cognitive
structures of future humans who will inhabit the near future.
Moreover, by envisioning future societies
based on the present, his work addresses distorted contemporary perceptions and
explores the potential for mutual understanding that can help overcome social
prejudices and discrimination through new sensory experiences.
“I imagine future societies based on the
present and, through a kind of narrative, explore the distorted perceptions of
our time. (…) I consider each work as a simulation and experiment with the
perception and cognitive structures of humans that may emerge in the near
future.” (Jinseung Jang, interview as an
artist-in-residence, MMCA Residency Goyang, 2022)
Jinseung Jang studied Design at Goldsmiths,
University of London, and received his Master’s degree in Painting from Hongik
University Graduate School. His solo exhibitions include 《Screening: The Ambient Gust》 (Seoul Art
Space Geumcheon, Seoul, 2024), 《L·A·P·S·E》 (CR Collective, Seoul, 2022), 《Réalité
Simulée》 (Onsu Gonggan, Seoul, 2021), and 《OLIGOPTICON》 (Space: illi, Seoul, 2020).
He has also participated in numerous group
exhibitions, including 《Synthetic Fever》 (Coreana Museum of Art, Seoul, 2025), 《Hymn
of Seoul》 (Artspace Boan1, Seoul, 2023), 《Horizontal》 (Noblesse Collection, Seoul,
2023), 《Digital Resonance》
(Gwangju Media Art Platform, Gwangju, 2022), 《Public
Art New Hero》 (Daecheong ho Museum of Art, Cheongju,
2021), and 《Private Song I》
(DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2020).
Jang has been an artist-in-residence at
Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (Seoul, 2024–2025), Masaha Residency (Riyadh, Saudi
Arabia, 2023), and MMCA Residency Goyang (Goyang, 2022). In 2020, he was
selected as a creator for Hyundai Motor Group’s open innovation platform
ZER01NE and as part of ‘Public Art New Hero 2020’.
