Tag: Gwangju Uprising

GWANGJU, Republic of Korea — I am looking at a screen. And these pixels — they too grow, becoming grandiose, revealing more pixels within. This ineluctable progression stops only when they suddenly transform into an isometrically-rendered building. This is just the beginning of Sunwoo Hoon’s web cartoon “Flat is the New Deep“ (2018), presented for the first time at this year’s Gwangju Biennale, Imagined Borders. But in fact, it operates as a powerful metaphor for the South Korean artist, who first encountered it as he doodled with Microsoft Paint during compulsory military service. For the pixel, as a unitary notation of any digital image, symbolizes not only the utopian representation of individuals in a democratic society, but also an ever-increasing flattening relationship between technological devices and politics. Immediately following are suspended iPhone screens with the hashtags #MeToo and #WithYou. Yet in “The Flat is Political” (2017), another work by Sunwoo displayed in conjunction with “Flat is the New Deep,” the reverse is true. Sunwoo shows how this can be dangerous: how the form of the pixels — as an image or a tweet — can remain the same, while its meaning shifts. “Flat is the New Deep“ reminds us that pixels are circulating faster than ever — growing and mutating like a cancerous cell, changing meaning at every turn The 12th Gwangju Biennale, Imagined Borders, is on view (111 Biennale-ro, yongbong-dong, Buk-gu, Gwangju , 500-845, Republic of Korea) until November 11.