JINJOON LEE: CHAMPAGNE SUPERNOVA

At the heart of the exhibition is the eponymous work, a large-scale video installation displayed on a 4 x 5.5-meter LED screen. Using Chain-of-Zoom (CoZ), a deep-learning-based AI super-resolution framework, the artist 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?

In Mnemosyne Theater, a VR work, and the companion single-channel video Memory Theatre, the viewer is plunged into a constantly rotating data panorama as a massive iris lens floats overhead, projecting impressions of the world. Drawing inspiration from Renaissance philosopher Giulio Camillo’s Theatre of Memory, the setting for these works is a circular theater composed of AI-aggregated imagery based on the artist’s own essays. Upon removing the VR headset, the viewers return to their everyday surroundings, though with the lingering question: Am I the observer, or the observed? 

Throughout the exhibition, Lee’s cross-media approach delves into “liminoid experience”—the interstices between the technological and the human. In Login Odyssey, a series of customized LPs bearing AI-generated imagery 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 that begins with images generated by AI based on artist’s essays and is subsequently reworked repeatedly by hand, presents uncanny, post-digital scenes that hover between the artificial and the organic, surreal landscape and still life—a contemporary vanitas of ephemerality and strange beauty in the digital age.

Reflecting the paradox of the supernova, an explosion of sublime brilliance carrying within it the seeds of its own end, the exhibition seeks to capture fleeting traces of humanity within the orbit of the ever expanding digital cosmos, inviting reflection on what it means to leave behind a portrait of ourselves in the face of ineluctable extinction.