Jo Jae

Based in Seoul, Jo Jae (b. 1990) examines the reciprocal relationship between physical environments and digital images, exploring how each shapes and extends the other. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, Jo focuses on the fragmentation of the visual field and the discontinuities of perception in our experience of a world increasingly configured by the production, circulation, and consumption of information and images on our screens.

Central to Jo’s practice is the gaming term “cooldown,” which functions as a conceptual framework for examining moments of delay and suspension within accelerated cycles of image production and consumption. This temporal structure extends into a broader investigation of contemporary visual regimes in which everything from game interfaces, short-form media, and advertising to signage are extracted from circulation and reassembled through a process of selection, collage, and painterly accumulation. Displaced from their original contexts, these fragments are reorganized into layered compositional fields in which acrylic paint, translucent mediums, and painterly gestures coalesce into material formations. Blurring the distinction between the visual and the tactile, Jo’s work gives form to the elusive conditions of cognition and perception in the digital age.