Jo Jae

Jo Jae (b. 1990) examines the conditions through which physical environments and digital images are mutually produced and continuously extended, attending to the resulting fragmentation of the visual field and the discontinuities of perception across painting, sculpture, and installation. Within contemporary contexts in which urban histories and environmental conditions are constantly reconfigured, information and images are immediately rendered visible, circulated, and consumed, producing regimes in which processes of reordering, rupture, and displacement are embedded in everyday visual experience. Attention is directed toward images not as fixed representational entities, but as continuously compressed and transformed flows operating within contemporary conditions of visual production, circulation, and consumption.

Jo’s deployment of the gaming term “Cooldown” operates as a structuring concept through which conditions of delay and suspension embedded within accelerated cycles of image production and consumption are articulated. This temporal framework extends into a broader engagement with contemporary visual regimes, in which disaster imagery, game interfaces, short-form media content, signage, and advertising are extracted from circulation and subjected to processes of selection, collage, and painterly accretion. Displaced from their original contexts, these visual fragments are reorganized into compositional fields in which layered applications of acrylic and translucent mediums, fragmented image units, and residual painterly gestures converge on the surface as condensed material formations.