Jaeyeol Han

 

▷ How did your current body of work begin?
It began with my experience in Haiti in 2010. There I came to reflect on how, even when a human body disappears, its trace remains as an image, and I began searching through painting for the essence and the workings that remain beyond the image’s surface. Taking photographs and press images of human faces, bodies, and crowds as my starting point, I dismantle and reassemble the figure. Pushing and pressing my self-made solid oil-paint material, the ‘PIGMENT BAR’, across the canvas, I have kept asking how far a face or body can collapse while still retaining the trace of existence.

 

▷ What new experience opens up when a work is translated into AR (augmented reality)?
I do not think AR can substitute for the materiality or weight of the original. Still, the fact that a work can be placed in a real space without a physical canvas, and appear differently according to the viewer’s position and movement, creates a new condition. In realizing it, rather than exaggerating technical effects, I took care that the original’s scale and proportions, the viewing distance, and its relationship to the space were not unduly distorted.

 

 

 

 

▷ What do you hope viewers feel in front of it?
As they follow the overlapping bodies merging into one and scattering again, I hope they will pause to question what it is they think they are seeing. And rather than the experience being complete within AR, I hope it leads to a curiosity to see for themselves the actual painting—its scale, its surface, the density of its paint. I hope AR serves not as a replacement for the original but as a gateway that brings viewers to stand before it.