Jo Jae (b. 1990) focuses on the ways in which the real and digital worlds expand through processes of mutual imitation, leading to the dissolution of boundaries between them. Interested in the intersection of reality and the virtual, the artist materializes fragmented digital images—circulated through screens—into the forms of painting and sculpture, thereby physically visualizing the interaction between the two realms.

Jo Jae’s early works began by focusing on the dominant sensory experiences of the urban environment. For instance, in her solo exhibition 《5 Minutes Rest, then 30 Seconds》 held at Space 413, the artist explored how familiar background noises—such as the constant sounds of traffic or the repetitive rhythms of advertisements—permeate our auditory perception within the city.
 
She became particularly interested in the unsettling feeling that arises when these habitual sounds suddenly disappear. By focusing on this unfamiliar moment of transition, the artist sought to visually construct the uneasy flow of that disrupted sensory experience.

As a mechanism for this exploration, Jo Jae devised a structure in which a powerful, rhythmically charged sound plays for 30 seconds, followed by five minutes of silence. This sonic arrangement was not merely an auditory experiment; rather, it served as a device through which the audience could physically experience how sensation becomes familiar—and then unfamiliar—through shifts in rhythm and presence.
 
Alongside this, objects were placed throughout the exhibition space. These were assembled from materials collected around the venue, as well as elements the artist engaged with while listening to the sound in the space. Left in an unfinished state, the objects exist in an open-ended form—neither fixed in origin nor purpose, but suspended in a moment of becoming.

Jo Jae explains that through this structure, she sought to visually explore how the endlessly repeated and forgotten sounds of daily life contribute to shaping the structure of the environments we inhabit. In this process, painting and installation function as tools of thought—devices that trace and embody her lines of inquiry.
 
In this way, Jo Jae has consistently drawn upon the fragments of urban sensibility and the scattered impressions they leave as raw material for her work. In the exhibition 《5 Minutes Rest, then 30 Seconds》, she investigated the conditioning of perception through the rhythm of noise and silence. In her subsequent works, she began to treat saturated sensory environments as a kind of matter, engaging more directly with the fleeting, intangible shards of sensation that emerge from within them.

For instance, in her 2019 series ‘Summing up Flexibility,’ Jo Jae deconstructs the idea of a “mass” and reassembles its fluid remnants in the form of canvases, sounds, and objects. The abstract images in this series appear as residual sensations with no identifiable source, visualizing afterimages shaped within the sensory field of the city.
 
Rather than revealing the full surface or total form of perception, Jo Jae focuses on the fringes of sensation—those that are overlooked, passed by, or buried. The debris of urban sensibility emerges in her work as abstract images or as objects such as industrial materials and toys, stripped of their original function and context, and reconfigured into new constellations.

In this body of work, the artist explores how perception is filtered and selectively muted, questioning how form is reconstructed through this process. Jo Jae explains that this approach is intended to avoid offering a definitive depiction of the city. Her practice is grounded in the recognition that, just as the city is in a constant state of collapse and rebuilding, perception, too, undergoes continuous cycles of construction and deconstruction.

In her 2020 solo exhibition 《Desensitiser》, Jo Jae presented works that reassembled the fragmented sensory structures of the city into a provisional sculptural language, creating a temporary state of balance. These works stemmed from her inquiry into how the visual scattering of perception might be reconstructed into a landscape one can endure.
 
Jo Jae used fragments of objects that carry no clear meaning—materials collected from urban environments, chance-found images, and discarded structural elements—as the units of her sculptural compositions. By transforming the overwhelming sensorial noise of the city into refined visual scenes, she treated these sculptural elements as peripheral sensory traces that resist assimilation into a fixed system. Her aim was to visually capture the moment just before these fragments congeal—suspended in a state of becoming.

One of the key structures in Jo Jae’s work is a canvas mounted on a steel support shaped like the sole of a foot. This configuration presents the painting as a mobile object, serving as a device to liberate painting from its conventional role as a fixed object of contemplation. The painting, now equipped with feet, becomes a metaphor for a fragmented state of sensation and identity—existing like a drifting, swaying fragment of urban sensibility.

Jo Jae’s interest in the remnants of urban landscapes has naturally extended into the digital screen environment. In her series ‘Debris’ (2021–2024), she focuses on the visual fragmentation produced by digital interfaces—their sharp contours, intricate and uneven densities of information.
 
The artist collects fragments that emerge during the process of image editing, such as geometric outlines generated by applying effects, the edges of deleted images, and traces of overlapping or separation. She perceives these elements as a kind of visual debris. Drawing particular inspiration from the common “outline” techniques used in digital drawing environments, she introduces into her paintings the act of drawing or dismantling along these fine, artificial boundaries.

In Jo Jae’s work, these fragments are not merely insignificant remnants detached from a central whole—they function as key elements that disperse perception and expose moments of rupture. Pixelated boundaries, abrupt contrasts in artificial lighting, and minuscule visual units all reveal a kind of instability in resolution, pinpointing where the flow of perception breaks down.
 
Her process typically begins by capturing outlines from the screen, which she then transfers onto the canvas. Over these traces, she layers color—not to define form, but to let sensation follow the path of preexisting lines. This method creates a structure where perception does not shape the form but rather moves along the residual contours that have already been laid down.

The artist explains that through this work, she aims to visually trace how perception is regulated by certain structures within the digital environment. In particular, she focuses on how fragmented image units infiltrate the senses and tracks where attention breaks and reconnects, devising a painterly strategy that records this process directly on the canvas.

Furthermore, in her 2023 solo exhibition 《Melting Things》 at the Kumho Museum of Art, Jo Jae revealed works that explore information loss in digital images and patterns of media consumption. Using vectorization methodologies, she visually exposed how disaster images undergo information degradation and traced how these images selectively transform and reconstruct reality.
 
To achieve this, the artist collected actual disaster images and news articles, digitally vectorizing them into basic elements such as points, lines, and planes. During this reduction process, specific details of the original images were simplified or omitted, and the associated emotions also faded, resulting in an emotional void.

homogeneous forms. The large-scale disaster piles installed in the exhibition embody the results of such manipulation and beautification, critically reflecting today’s media strategies that process even disasters into consumable images or transform them into aesthetic objects.
 
For example, Immunity (2023) vectorizes an image of the coronavirus found on the web, selectively reconstructing certain forms three-dimensionally to visually expose the loss of information present in the original image. Additionally, the artist appropriated disaster images and internet articles related to incidents such as the Fukushima nuclear accident and the Itaewon tragedy, reconstructing them into fragmented image pieces. She then titled the works using words collected from the articles, revealing the fragmented and partial manner in which disaster information is communicated.

Additionally, Jo Jae analyzed errors and discrepancies that occur during the production and consumption of images through the concept of “pumping.” She likens the rapid spread and subsequent fading of digital images to a balloon that inflates and deflates through pumping. The extent of an image’s spread can vary greatly depending on who is doing the “pumping,” and when disasters occur, past incidents are often re-examined and amplified, sometimes regardless of the actual reality behind the original image.
 
While contemplating this phenomenon, the artist went to actual disaster sites and began inflating life-sized balloons. Through this performative approach, she evokes the tangible reality of disasters while metaphorically creating a mental image where inflated images and concepts float and drift.

Jo Jae’s recent works originate from the visual effects of games, encrypted patterns, and the repetitive gestures found in short-form content like shorts and reels, exploring painterly how digital environments influence sensory and response patterns. For example, the series ‘On Cooldown’ (2025) borrows the gaming term “cooldown,” which refers to the waiting period before a skill can be reused, and transforms it into a time of suspension—an interval of recovery and recalibration to prevent sensory exhaustion in a tech-driven environment.
 
The composition of these works also reflects the logic of digital environments. Rhythms of segmentation, compression, and repetition seen in scrolling and clip transitions are translated into clashes and misalignments within the divisions on the canvas. This evokes the speed of sensation flowing past before the eye can even settle.

The working process unfolds through an overlapping of digital and analog methods. First, the artist photographs sculptures she has made, then reconstructs them into digital collages. These collages are printed onto canvas fabric, over which she applies layers of acrylic paint and translucent medium. This layering merges digital flatness with the physicality of painting, and the transmitted colors combined with the built-up textures create a new visual density.
 
Jo Jae describes this work as “an attempt to trace how the flow of sensation is delayed and loses direction under certain media conditions in an evolving visual environment, while exploring a new balance in sensory structure between the materiality of painting and the immateriality of images.”

In this way, Jo Jae has explored, from multiple angles, the moments when contemporary sensory systems fracture and become disoriented through the debris and fragments of images collected from urban and digital environments—and the continued possibilities for sensory responses that persist within that chaos. Amid an age where images are oversaturated and rapidly consumed, she persistently questions and experiments with how painting can develop new strategies for survival without wearing down our sensory perception.

 ”In a context where images are consumed at overwhelming speeds, I ask: how might painting respond, not by resisting this pace, but by articulating new modes of survival within it? I wish to continue exploring that possibility through the language of painting.”    (Jo Jae, Artist’s Note) 

Jo Jae earned a B.A. in Painting from Sungkyunkwan University and an M.A. in Painting from the Royal College of Art in the UK. Her major solo exhibitions include 《FACTORS》 (WWNN, Seoul, 2025), 《Melting Things》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023), 《Meeting Point》 (G Gallery, Seoul, 2021), 《5 Minutes Rest, then 30 Seconds》 (Space 413, Seoul, 2018), and more.
 
She also has participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as 《Acceleration Point》 (White Block Art Centre, Paju, 2024), 《My World In Your World》 (New Spring Project, Seoul, 2024), 《Humanism Reimagined》 (WWNN, Seoul, 2023), 《Phygital Reality》 (G Gallery, Seoul, 2022), and 《We Can Only Have Fun on Certain Days》 (Warbling Collective, Stour Space, London, 2019).
 
Jo Jae was selected as the 20th Kumho Young Artist in 2023, was a finalist for the Hopper Prize in the USA in 2019, and a finalist for the Young Contemporary Talent Purchase Prize of the Ingram Collection in the UK in 2016.

References

• 조재, Jo Jae (Artist Website)
• 지갤러리, 조재 (G Gallery, Jo Jae)
• 금호미술관, 누락 번역 (Kumho Museum of Art, Melting Things)
• 비애티튜드, 창작을 계속할지 말지 고민된다면