Ahram Kwon (b. 1987) creates multimedia installations that reveal reflections on media and its conceptual interconnections in a compressed and metaphorical manner. Primarily using digital screens and mirrors as her main materials, the artist critically reconstructs the illusions of the digital media world that influence real human life and society.

Ahram Kwon’s TV object installation Flat Matter (2017) marks the beginning of the structural foundation of her current practice. Combining digital screens and mirrors, the work alternates between mineral images the artist filmed herself, those found online, and artificially produced or modified images.
 
As the three-dimensional, physical form of matter is flattened and stripped of volume and texture through the smooth surface of the digital screen, viewers find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the different types of images.
 
This work prompted Kwon’s ongoing interest in the gap between reality and virtuality that arises when the physical world becomes dematerialized through its entry into the digital realm. Since then, she has continued to reconstruct the illusions produced and represented by media, using digital screens and mirrors as her primary mediums.

In her 2018 solo exhibition 《Flat Matters》 at ONE AND J. +1, Ahram Kwon further developed her critical inquiry into the gap between media and reality. According to the artist, the exhibition “began as a reflection on the phenomenon of media penetrating the personal realm and transmitting the world as flat images.”
 
Kwon also questions the organic relationship in which media, a human invention, influences human thought and behavior. She sought to translate the formal characteristics of digital screens into the language of sculpture, thereby revealing the fact that the images reflected by media are nothing more than flat matter.
 
For example, the work Flat Matters (2018), which shares its title with the exhibition, compresses the fictional images transmitted through media, the gap between fiction and reality, and the notion of the world as error into abstract forms, using the materiality of the screen to express them once again.

The work constructs an illusory space beyond the screen by reflecting the screen and mirror onto each other. The mirror and screen mediate one another to generate a space beyond the flat surface, but since they reflect what is not “real,” that space remains merely a “flat” illusion.
 
Ahram Kwon also incorporates the blue and red screens—some of the most iconic error visuals seen on a PC—into her work. The artist views these moments as when media most clearly reveals its own presence. Representing failures within media environments, these error screens collide with each other, while segmented mirrors reflect both the screen and the real space to reproduce illusory images. In this way, Flat Matters takes its place in space as a kind of monument to the illusion-filled digital society.

Through this work, the artist intuitively and critically reveals how information is circulated, shared, and comes to influence the real world through screens. Tiffany Yeon Chae, curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, describes the piece as visualizing the phenomenon of "reset syndrome"—a growing loss of reality—as we increasingly inhabit the online world of Web 3.0, or the metaverse, where it becomes difficult to distinguish between transmitted images and their reflections in the mirror.

Furthermore, Ghost Wall (2019), presented in the 2019 exhibition 《The Unstable Objects》 at the Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, explores the digital world—where everything is distributed as flat, two-dimensional images—in a more immersive and performative manner.
 
In this work, the monitor sheds its everyday identity as a household TV by being encased in a painted steel structure, taking on a presence more akin to a performer. Over time, images such as shattered glass and red color fields appear on the screen, accompanied by sound, and shift with temporal intervals. These images are then reflected across the mirrors attached to each monitor, creating a layered and reciprocal visual experience.

In this work, the image of shattered glass serves as a visual device that reveals the physical reality of the digital screen, while the red field symbolizes the red screen that indicates computer monitor errors. The information we receive through screens on a daily basis is presented as flat, two-dimensional images, and their physical substance remains hidden behind the surface of the glass. The data and visuals transmitted through the glass screen exist as unverifiable entities, blurring the line between illusion and error.
 
Kwon points out that the screen hides its true nature behind the transparent exterior of the glass, while obscuring the illusionary nature of the world and driving reality. Hence Kwon compares this effect to a ghost, and critically represents the effect through the images of broken glass.

In the 2021 solo exhibition 《Freeze》 at The Great Collection, the artist drew inspiration from the video effect of “freeze frame” — a technique that halts motion on screen — to spatially realize a system error causing the screen to stop. The work ‘Freeze’ (2021), sharing the exhibition’s title, is a series of sculptural objects that primarily utilize mirrors reflecting the surrounding environment. These fragmentarily constructed mirror objects project parts of the exhibition space, encouraging viewers to continuously become aware of their surroundings.

Meanwhile, in Walls (2021), presented at the 2022 《The 21st SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 where the artist won the grand prize, Kwon structurally expressed a critical perspective on the politics of media. In this work, she introduced LED panels for the first time, expanding both the form and content of her previous practice.
 
The fragmented screens suspended in the exhibition space combine with reflective mirrors to emit flickering noise, symbolically condensing the principles of capital and economy, as well as the relationship between production and consumption behind the smooth screens and images, through the metaphor of error.

The error screens of blue and red flicker irregularly, intertwined with distorted sounds, repeating at an increasingly rapid pace. Suddenly, the screens shift to a pixelated display, as if experiencing a signal failure. At this moment, the information projected onto the screen is erased, revealing the physical screen itself as a floating, tangible object. This moment of exposure makes the audience aware of the media’s presence.
 
Through this, the artist visualizes the contradictory nature of the screen: when powered off, it becomes a physical wall; when powered on, it serves as a conduit reflecting human desires. In other words, in Walls, the artist symbolically represents the screen as media that operates as “a dual entity that is both material and immaterial, both space and particle.”

On June 24, the artist’s solo exhibition 《Fever Eye》 will open at SONGEUN. The exhibition examines how rapidly evolving technologies are overheating current systems and the resulting societal side effects. The artist questions how today’s excessive visual perception—rooted in the digitization of physical reality through CCTV installations across the city, AI sensors serving as autonomous driving “eyes,” and image dataset training for machine learning—will shape the future.
 
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the new work Fever Eye (2025), which captures humans drifting within an ecosystem where information, commodities, technology, and capital are intertwined and boundaries have blurred, leaving no clear escape from platforms and channels. Surrounding the exhibition space, LED panels emit an intense red glow—symbolic of screen errors and the overall heated present—offering a metaphor for the current state of excess.
 
In this work, the flickering screens appear again, but without sound, emphasizing purely visual “distancing effect” (Verfremdungseffekt). This silencing interrupts the audience’s immersion, instead encouraging a critical distance from the artwork.

Another new work, The Backrooms (2025), unfolds as a continuation of the earlier piece Walls, recreating the anxiety and sensory confusion that arise at the boundary between reality and virtuality. Inspired by the urban legend circulating online called “The Backroom,” which refers to an infinite, cramped space where reality and virtuality are intertwined, the artist materializes the liminal space atmosphere created by the repetition and distortion of familiar spaces and the accumulation of untraceable images within the underground space of SONGEUN.
 
Mesh LED panels, whose backsides are visible like a net, are installed as if floating in midair. The video images overlap and seep transparently, occupying the entire space. Through this, the closed-off imagery of infinitely continuing 3D digital spaces within the screen and the enveloping soundscape together create a hallucinatory spatial experience that evokes feelings of unfamiliarity and unease.

In this way, Ahram Kwon critically explores media that rapidly changes and subtly influences our daily lives through her artworks. She regards the screen today not merely as a device that projects images, but as a complex and structural space where capitalist systems operate to control and design users’ senses, cognition, reason, and emotions.
 
Her work disrupts ordinary perception and induces a reversal of recognition, enabling contemporary viewers—who daily consume, share, and reproduce countless information and images through digital screens—to sense the various errors, illusions, and desires that exist beneath the flat surface of the screen.

 ”As I incorporated concepts of media theory as key content in my work, I made use of the characteristics of reflection by the mirrors and screens. I felt that the relationship between the work’s form and content was similar to the principles of image production by media, which is an area of interest for me, or to the ways in which media companies reveal their ulterior motives.  Through artwork that is cut as if with a knife and composed in lucid colors, I am able to conceptualize this hidden meaning of media objects that manipulate societies and people behind the scenes.”     (Ahram Kwon, from the talk program of SeMA Nanji Residency) 

Ahram Kwon graduated with a B.F.A. from the College of Art and Design at Konkuk University’s Department of Advertising and Visual Design. She earned an M.F.A. in Fine Art in Media from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London (UCL) in the UK. Later, she received her Ph.D. in Design from the College of Fine Art at Seoul National University. Her solo exhibitions include 《Fever Eye》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2025), 《Freeze》 (The Great Collection, Seoul, 2021), and 《Flat Matters》 (ONE AND J. +1, Seoul, 2018).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions such as 《-Director》 (KICHE, Seoul, 2024), 《Tourism》 (SeMA Nanji Residency, Seoul, 2022), 《Grid Island》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《The 21st SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2022), and 《The Best World Possible》 (Platform L Contemporary Art Center, Seoul, 2019).
 
Kwon has been selected for artist-in-residence programs including Gallery Purple Studio (2024–2025), SeMA Nanji Residency (2022, 2020), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart Residency Program (2016), and MMCA Residency Goyang (2015). In 2022, she won the Grand Prize at the 21st SONGEUN Art Award. Her works are in the collections of the SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul Museum of Art, and Seoul Metropolitan Goverment.

References

• 권아람, Ahram Kwon (Artist Website)
• 비애티튜드, 스크린 너머 허구적 공간 속으로
• 채연, 권아람 작가론: 스펙타클의 변주와 미디어 비판, 월간미술 2022.4월호
• 서울시립미술관, 불안한 사물들 – 권아람 ‘유령 월’ (Seoul Museum of Art, The Unstable Objects – Ahram Kwon ‘Ghost Wall’)
• 아트바바, 더 그레잇 컬렉션 – 프리즈 (Artbava, The Great Collection – Freeze)
• 키아프 서울, 송은 – 피버 아이 (Kiaf Seoul, SONGEUN – Fever Eye)