Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Uri Han has held solo exhibitions including 《Loop: The Tail Wagging the Dog》 (Amado Art Space, Seoul, 2024), 《Thread and Re-winder》 (Artspace Boan, Seoul, 2022), and 《Vagued Fata Morgana》 (Cheongju Art Studio, Cheongju, 2020).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Han has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Random Access Project 4.0》 (Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin, 2025), 《Nam June Paik, Sylbee Kim, Yaloo, Uri Han: Positive Feedback》 (Gallery BHAK, Seoul, 2024), Frieze Film 2023 《It was the way of walking through narrative》 (Artspace Boan, Seoul, 2023), 《Images》 (HITE Collection, Seoul, 2023), 《The Missing Duduri》 (TINC, Seoul, 2022), and the Switzerland International Film Festival, Foreign Films (Aubonne, Switzerland), among others.

Residencies (Selected)

Uri Han was an artist-in-residence at the MMCA Residency Goyang (2023) and Cheongju Art Studio (2019–2020).

Collections (Selected)

Han’s works are held in the collections of the MMCA Art Bank, the Seoul Metropolitan Government, and the Yangju Chang Ucchin Museum of Art.

Originality & Identity

Uri Han’s inquiry begins at the site of “disappearance.” In the solo exhibition 《Vagued Fata Morgana》 (Cheongju Art Studio, 2020), she slows our gaze toward faint scenes poised “on the boundary between what exists and what is perceived.” Still-life arrangements of fruit, melting candles, and a boiling pot metaphorize matter’s changing states, while the observing look at her father’s body captures both the erasure and persistence of personal memory. The desire to hold on to scenes destined to vanish becomes the work’s driving force.

This concern soon expands to the disappearance of things and technologies. 《Thread and Re-winder》 (Artspace Boan, 2022) foregrounds the temporality of 16mm film. A signature work, Bertinker (2022), overlays the life of “the once-named and now nameless” with a fictional myth around Musca (the Fly). Phantom Sense (2022) recalls lost faculties—touch, hearing, sight—through the perspectives of children left behind in a digital age, and Thin and Deep (2022) shows a social ecology in which film–parts–know-how are sustained by archives and communities, opening the theme of solidarity between things and humans.

In the recent solo exhibition 《Loop: The Tail Wagging the Dog》 (Amado Art Space, 2024), the “volume” of the material that once enabled the image’s eternal time is set in motion again. Orbiting the world-building of The Silver Particle (2023), three videos—Loop (2024), Portal (2024), and Matches (2024)—interpenetrate to ask what gets erased and what remains behind the mystification of technology. A Sisyphus variation (Loop), the deficit within the “immaculate” portal (Portal), and the paradox of regaining time through not-seeing (Matches) lightly interrogate the borders of fiction/reality and language/image.

Ultimately, Han tracks the invisible rules that divide “old/new, discarded/used, hidden/revealed.” As the point of departure in the group show 《Images》 (HITE Collection, 2023), Phantom Sense and Bertinker frame image-making as an event of personal will; in 《Random Access Project 4.0》 (Nam June Paik Art Center, 2025), the context of Loop contemporizes relations among medium–apparatus–space. In her world, things are not residues of the past but switches that recalibrate the present.

Style & Contents

Han’s formal choices consistently cant toward content. In the early exhibition 《Vagued Fata Morgana》, the breathing between dual channels and black-and-white/color accrues a dense sense of finitude through “slowness.”

Later, in 《Thread and Re-winder》, a strategy of recomposing “found stories” stands out—constellations and old nomenclatures in Bertinker; the Hamelin tale in Phantom Sense; the practices of an online film community in Thin and Deep. Fact/fiction and public/private are plaited into an analog–digital hybrid.

Translation happens at the level of apparatus too. Loop circulates 16mm film through a real loop mechanism (stainless steel, acrylic, projector), restoring the interface icon of “infinite replay” to material volume. Portal juxtaposes a monolith/door/smartphone-like screen with fading figures, labor, and byproducts to visualize what “smoothness” excludes; Matches proposes an aesthetics of not-seeing via a small light source (a match) and a re-scripted Frankenstein. The three works loosely share the world of The Silver Particle, building a multilayered narrative that traverses text–image–object.

The camera–projection–screen triangle is likewise renewed. Double transfers between analog film and digital leave particulate time on the image surface, while the projector’s mechanics and beam convert the gallery into an “expanded frame.” Further, the publication+DVD installation sutures reading/viewing/walking into a single exhibition itinerary.

Through narrative, apparatus, and media conversion, Han performs a “re-enfranchisement of the senses.” The trajectory from still-life mise-en-scène to mythic allegory, from the materiality of devices to moments of visual repose, constitutes a fine-grained engineering by which images again operate as a totality of sensation.

Topography & Continuity

Within contemporary Korean art, Han’s coordinates lie at the juncture of “media archaeology” and “narrative engineering.” She refuses to sentimentalize the old; instead, by slightly torquing the sleek skin of technology, she summons the leftover sensations, labor, and byproducts in its seams (Portal, Thin and Deep). Consequently, film is redefined not as a “medium of the past” but as a “medium of relations.”

Her practice unfolds organically—from recording personal disappearances (Vagued Fata Morgana) to the social ecologies around the vanishing of things/technologies (Thin and Deep), and on to world-sharing narrative–apparatus constructions (Loop, Matches, The Silver Particle). This flow consistently enacts the stated aim of microscopically tracking what is “circulated/discarded” at the borders of image and language, fiction and reality.

The work can be read along three axes: first, format experiments that carry resonance of “thin objects” across exhibition and non-exhibition environments by linking text–film–object (publication, DVD, loop device); second, sound–optical design that translates the materiality/labor of projection apparatus into the gallery’s rhythm; third, a research-based mode of production that embeds community knowledge and historical or oral narratives.

Going forward, Han is expected to keep finely tuning small devices—loops, portals, matches—continuing “narrative–apparatus” projects that traverse diverse platforms, reactivating the temporality of disappearing things within today’s sensorium.