ritual for the night

yaehun park

5 March 2022 - 27 March 2022

Opening Saturday March 5th 15.00 – 18.00 hrs

Using 3D simulation in the space of Bradwolff Projects, Jaehun Park’s new works examine the human impact on the Earth. We live in a time where everything is connected by super-fast 5G internet technology, but are we confronting the crisis of symbiosis on Earth? Ritual for the Night is what the artist calls a realistic view of the present age in which disasters, climate change, and geopolitical conflicts inescapably reveal the human destruction of the planet.

On show at Bradwolff Projects are new works in which Park investigates the melting of an iceberg in an artificial structure; objects as metaphors that reveal geopolitical conflict between western and eastern cultures; computer-based algorithms that reproduce nature’s mechanisms in a virtual space, and in doing so poeticizes a nature that is changing.

Park’s virtual works deal with current problematic events on Earth by zooming in on cleverly chosen metaphors and objects. In these simulated video works, he translates physical substance using 3D scanning technology into virtual substance, such as polygon structures and point cloud systems (a set of data points in space). He uses hyper-realistic 3D rendering to stage mass-produced objects – as vessels of capitalistic ideology – in an abandoned digital space or to situate them in ‘ritualistic’ installations depicting impossible natural phenomena.

The different kinds of staged objects depict dark Korean histories, but also violent histories of the entire human race. Moreover, these by-products of a hyper-capitalistic, machine-driven civilization and symbols of war unfold in a virtual hellscape – a place inhabited by ready-made 3D digital objects as well as instruments of torture and tortured humans. A seemingly unreal landscape; perhaps closer to the reality of our time than we wish to believe.

Park doesn’t shy away from anything in his work. With his simulation algorithms, manipulated and staged virtual landscapes, and installations, he reveals the tip of the real world – oversaturated by hideous and glorious moments of capitalism. Desire, vanity, guilt, irrationality, and indebtedness become resources in the ‘ritual’ space of capitalism. The concept of hell doesn’t manifest itself after death, but here in this hellish reality.

Jaehun Park (born 1986, South Korea; lives and works in Amsterdam) graduated from the Department of Painting (BFA, MFA) at Seoul National University and did the Master Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. Recent exhibitions include Plein Theater Amsterdam (2022), Alternative Space Loop Seoul (2021), Sign Project Space Groningen (2021), Photo Basel (2021), Unseen Amsterdam (2021), Project Space 1646 The Hague (2019), and Artspace O Seoul (2016). His work is part of several collections including Normec, The Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Korea Institute for Advanced Study, and the Seoul National University Health Service Center.

The soundscape was made by sound artist and performer Ivo Bol.