Installation view ©N/A

Jihyoung Han’s solo exhibition 《identi-kit : The people’s choices》 opens today (8th) and will run through the 31st at N/A, located in Euljiro. The space is closed on Mondays.

The exhibition explores a world beyond human intelligence and reexamines the cultural value of the body as a sociostructural model. On the second floor of the exhibition space, visitors encounter a setting that includes indoor landscaping, brochures featuring a corporate logo, a coffee table, and a television screen—all composed to resemble the interior of a business hotel or the pages of a design catalog. This scene imagines a future in which words like "nature" and "environment" remain only as language, detached from material presence.

《identi-kit : The people’s choices》 presents a fictional corporate showroom as its conceptual framework. Through this, the exhibition seeks to reestablish the concept of the human body, activate the notion of the non-human as a new form of existence, and compare the world shaped by cognition to one shaped by sensory perception.

Fascinated by pseudo-science and imagery that incites propaganda, Han established a fictional company called "identi-kit" modeled after a pseudo-tech startup. The subtitle of the exhibition, “The people’s choices”, is a reference to the 1981 exhibition organized by the group Material.

Installation view ©N/A

"identi-kit" proposes a leap beyond human-centered thought and imagery, which are processed through digital patterns such as molecular biology, neural networks, embryonic regeneration, and genetic engineering. As a company, it continues ecological and environmental research through a scientistic view of nature. Inspired by the concept of endosymbiosis championed by American biologist Lynn Margulis, identi-kit reimagines its platform users as symbiotic entities within an ecosystem. It calls for an image-making process that is not solitary, but collective—emphasizing an identity formed not by becoming a singular human, but by embodying the multiplicity of many.

Its new SNS model operates through a sharing economy system of renting and borrowing “individuals,” producing abstract images by injecting and shaping the sensorial structures of each user’s mind. The absorbed fragments of experiences and events that resonate with our nervous system—along with user-edited images—become independent worlds or creatures. These resulting entities erase the fixed appearance of the human, no longer determined by anthropomorphic form.

In the journey to find symbiotic partners, users encounter various filters of refraction and reflection, continuously evolving into new abstract forms. The expanding sensory activities of these users become shared bodily experiences, raising questions about collective identity defined as "us."

"identi-kit" advocates for the expansion of concepts such as maintenance, environment, technology, and boundaries. It supports the emergence of territorial selves and tribes, ever-renewed through collaboration—its central philosophy being “making-with-world.” The countless layers that compose the individual self often incur loss on the path toward forming a singular identity. Until now, users on other platforms have generated image-sustaining components only within their own limits. identi-kit proposes a new method of resonance to surpass such limitations.

On the journey to discover coexistent others, users continuously encounter new filters of reflection and refraction, adopting ever-evolving abstract forms. In this world built through resonance and shared creation with others, an abstract world emerges—transcending the structure of life’s DNA and pointing toward a transcendent future.

What happens when the immense space called “human” is uncompressed? The identities and selves born from boundaries meet the surface and generate playful acts, leading to unpredictable multiplicity and opening new visual proposals for the future.

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