Originality & Identity

Since her early works, Jo Jae has focused on the sensory structures and fragmentations created by urban environments. In her solo exhibition 《5 Minutes Rest, then 30 Seconds》(Space 413, 2018), she explored how urban noise permeates daily life and how the disappearance of these sounds triggers anxiety. The exhibition focused on deconstructing and visualizing the conditioning of sensory experience embedded within familiar environments.

In 《Translation》(Art Space Loo, 2019), the artist expanded this inquiry based on the recognition that the total representation of urban sensibility is impossible. Through recombining and dismantling the debris and fragments of the urban sensory field, she emphasized the confusion and incompleteness of perception. Her series ‘Summing up Flexibility’(2019) demonstrates that urban sensibility can never be fully restored or synthesized.

After her solo show 《Desensitiser》(Interart Channel, 2020), Jo Jae's thematic interests extended beyond the physical environment to digital realms. In her series ‘Debris’(2021–2024), she concentrated on the fragmentation of screen-based images, their artificial contours, and the discontinuities of information, delving into how the boundaries between digital and real worlds are becoming increasingly blurred.

In 《Melting Things》(Kumho Museum of Art, 2023), she critically examined the loss of information and emotional erasure in digital images. Through vectorizing disaster imagery, she revealed gaps in information and sensory voids, tracing how images selectively transform reality.

Most recently, in 《FACTORS》(WWNN, 2025), Jo Jae's series ‘On Cooldown’(2025) reflects on the sensory exhaustion and fragmented rhythms inherent to digital environments such as games and short-form content. She introduces the notion of suspended time—intervals for recovery and recalibration—as a conceptual device. This continues her consistent investigation into the instability and fragmentation of sensory structures, now reinterpreted within the conditions of the digital age.

Style & Contents

Jo Jae’s formal experimentation has been rooted in a multimedia approach, traversing sound, installation, painting, and sculpture since her early practice. In 《5 Minutes Rest, then 30 Seconds》(Space 413, 2018), she constructed a structure where 30 seconds of intense, rhythmic sound is followed by five minutes of silence, accompanied by fragmented objects scattered throughout the exhibition space. These installations functioned as mechanisms for audiences to physically experience the familiar becoming unfamiliar.

In 《Translation》(Art Space Loo, 2019), painting and installation were again intertwined, with urban sensory debris materialized through abstract images and objects. During this period, the artist utilized industrial materials, toys, and color field abstractions to embody the excess and fragments of urban perception.

After 《Desensitiser》(2020), she combined the flatness of painting with the spatiality of installation in new formats. The canvas structure mounted on foot-shaped steel supports in Landscape F and Five Byproducts(2020) presented paintings as mobile objects, symbolically exposing fragmented perception and unstable identities.

In her recent series ‘Debris’(2021–2024) and ‘On Cooldown’(2025), the visual language of digital environments is actively incorporated. She extracts outlines from screen-based images and transfers them onto canvas, layering acrylic, gel mediums, and digital prints. This technique intersects flat digital imagery with the materiality of painting, producing new visual densities.

Her sculpture Immunity(2023), exhibited at the Kumho Museum of Art, appropriated disaster images and online articles to highlight the deletion of information and emotions inherent in digital imagery. Through vectorization and physical reconstruction, Jo Jae reveals how images are aesthetically reprocessed into objects that conceal the original informational voids.

Topography & Continuity

Jo Jae has consistently explored fragments, remnants, and discontinuities of perception collected from urban and digital environments. The deconstruction, excess, and reconfiguration of sensory experience are persistent conceptual threads running through her work.

Her early sonic and installation experiments evolved into combinations of painting and objects, and after 《Melting Things》(Kumho Museum of Art, 2023), her practice expanded into critiques of digital imagery and media consumption. Her investigation into the manipulation and information loss within disaster imagery connects to a broader expansion of her sculptural language.

By traversing painting, installation, sound, and digital technologies, she constructs a hybrid language aimed at reconstructing new sensory structures. Through intersecting painting with materiality, she presents new painterly strategies to counteract the sensory exhaustion of the digital age, establishing her unique position within contemporary art discourse.