JINJOON LEE: CHAMPAGNE SUPERNOVA
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ABOUT
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JINJOON LEE: CHAMPAGNE SUPERNOVA
23 AUGUST - 18 OCTOBER 2025
SOLO EXHIBITION OF
JINJOON LEE
BB&M is pleased to present Champagne Supernova, a solo exhibition by media artist Jinjoon Lee. Borrowing its title from the iconic 1995 Oasis track, the exhibition conjures the euphoric yet melancholic symbolism of youth, fame, and disappearance. This poetic metaphor, widely echoed in pop culture, reemerged in 2003 as the name of a peculiar supernova, SN 2003fg, which defied the mass limits of standard stellar explosions—a dazzling detonation described as “bursting like champagne.” Lee draws from this dual legacy to reflect on the paradox of contemporary existence: that our brightest moments often contain the seeds of their own rapid extinction.
In April 2025, Lee garnered international attention with Good Morning Mr. G-Dragon, a project that transmitted an AI-generated video—based on the iris data of a globally renowned K-pop artist—alongside his music into deep space. Champagne Supernova extends this trajectory, presenting the culmination of Lee’s long-standing exploration of the iris as a cosmic portal that dissolves the boundaries between the self and the universe.
At the heart of the exhibition is the eponymous work, a large-scale video installation displayed on a 4 x 5.5 m LED screen. Using Chain-of-Zoom (CoZ), a deep-learning-based AI super-resolution framework, Lee has extracted 88 radial patterns from high-resolution images of irises, transforming them into abstract sequences of light and color. The iris—a unique biometric identifier—here becomes a celestial imprint, a fleeting trace of pure luminescence. Tracing this process of transformation, the artist invites the viewer to ask: Where does the self begin and end? How finite or infinite are the memories and data that shape us?A circular theater composed of AI-aggregated and reassembled imagery based on the artist’s own essays forms the setting for the VR video Mnemosyne Theater and the companion single-channel video Memory Theatre. Drawing inspiration from Renaissance philosopher Giulio Camillo’s Theatre of Memory, these works plunge the viewer into a constantly rotating data panorama. A massive iris lens floats overhead, projecting impressions of the world. While viewers return to their everyday surroundings upon removing the VR headset, they are left with the lingering question: Am I the observer, or the observed? In Login Odyssey, a series of customized LPs bearing AI-generated imagery that is painted onto the vinyl discs by the artist is played on Mnemosyne No. 2, a specially designed turntable scanner. These hybrid objects translate visual data into sound, offering a multi-sensory experience that traverses layers of perception.Finally, On Some Faraway Shore, a series of hybrid collage paintings renders uncanny, post-digital imagery in surfaces that appear both artificial and biological. Generated by AI from provided texts and then reworked repeatedly by hand, the resulting layers embody a contemporary vanitas—a vision of disappearance and strange beauty coexisting in the digital age. Throughout the exhibition, Lee’s cross-media approach expands on his ongoing investigation into “liminoid experience”—spaces between technological and the human—offering a multidimensional expression of both sculptural intuition and speculative inquiry.Champagne Supernova thus metaphorically reflects the paradox of the supernova: an explosion of sublime brilliance carrying within it the seeds of its own end. Like the last flare of a dying star, the exhibition captures fleeting traces of humanity within the orbit of the digital cosmos, inviting reflection on what it means to leave behind a portrait at the precise moment of vanishing—where art and technology collide at the edge of extinction. -
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