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#Mysterious stories told online
"There was a village where everyone had to close their eyes when they were born. The villagers were cursed with a witch's curse..”
That's how NOH Sangho's 37-year-old story used to start. It was a method of showing it on social networking services (SNS) along with a painting drawn with a clear watercolor brush. The painting with a delicate arrangement of refreshing complementary colors harmonized with the story. Texts and pictures have spread like word of mouth online. On the feed that is updated every moment, the story has sometimes dispersed without ending. Some were forgotten and others remained only as fragmented scenes. But it was okay not to end it. Many people liked NOH Sangho's work, which comes up every day. By the time he was curious about the end, he had made up a whole new story. Online is this kind of place, just as it shows us that creation here is consumed like this.
The first sentence cited is also the name of the work presented in the exhibition "Young Search" of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2014. The work was displayed inside the "Merchen Carriage," which was converted from an abandoned rear car in front of Hongdae. Paintings of scenes in the story were placed in the dark carriage, and the audience could only illuminate part of the screen using a flashlight. Like rumors circulating in the world, those who peeped into fragmentary stories like dim lyrics filled the margins with imagination. Among them, curious people came to the author's online account.
#Art After the Internet - Korea's Post-Internet Generation
Internet-based art emerged under the name "net art" in the mid-1990s. It refers to art using materials found on the Internet. The key point is that the results are not just imitations, and there should be no debate about the originality. Afterwards, New York artist Marissa Olsen (46) proposed a name encompassing contemporary Internet-based art with the expressions "Art After the Internet" (2006) and "Post Internet Art" (2008). Artie Bierkant (37), the representative artist of the trend, said that post-internet art is "art between new media art that emphasizes technological media materiality and conceptual art that values intangible ideas." (2010).
It was in the mid-2010s that the Korean art world paid attention to the post-internet generation. It refers mainly to artists born in the 1980s. They are also the main players in the "new space" activities. It refers to a self-sustaining exhibition space established and operated by young artists. It is similar to the "alternative space" of the senior generation in that it operates outside the system, while it is differentiated in that it focuses on online activities. The offline exhibition hall was set up in an idle space in the city center, which is difficult to find without a smartphone map. The aspect of forming solidarity within SNS was also remarkable.
The reason why art of the generation is special is that it has experienced both analog and digital in a growing environment. They learned the world from childhood paper books, grew with the spread of the Internet in adolescence, and held smartphones as adults. Although he received education centered on traditional techniques such as painting, sculpture, and printmaking at a domestic art university, he simultaneously accepts international trends through the Internet and explores new expressions. As much as they are interested in digital technology, they are also the generation that enjoys analog. NOH Sangho is one of them.
#Digital Nomads from the Analog World - NOH Sangho's Hybrid Painting
The paintings that Noh Sang-ho presented online as if they were serialized were called "Daily Fiction" (2011-). The A4 size work, which has been painted one by one every day, has now been reborn as a series of thousands of pages. The reason why the material is not dry is that the material of the painting is information circulating on the Internet. News that appear and disappear, low-definition photos, and ownerless stories are inspirations.
NOH Sangho's painting is a hybrid painting that moves between digital and analog. The work begins with printing out a randomly collected digital image and then copying it on paper using an ink stick. In the course of drawing, the original image is reconstructed as a completely different result from the original. A copy of the finished picture is uploaded back to the Internet. It is the work of reinterpreting digital information in an analog way and converting it into digital once again. In other words, it is an attitude that does not end analog gestures while using digital. This is because he is today's digital nomad who lives on his feet in the analog world. It is to digest the nature of the virtual world that volatilizes every moment with the real body.
The Daily Fiction has been expanded into an oil painting series titled "The Great Chapbook" (2016~). It is a method of creating a large world by placing numerous images on a large screen. The screen is reminiscent of a giant cloud filled with digital files. Starting with the solo exhibition of the same name, the artist no longer made a written story. This is to focus on the world theme of the work that explores the way contemporary images are consumed.
#Holy images out of reach - 'Holy'
Noh Sangho's new work produced this year will be presented at Arario Gallery Seoul.The "Romantic Irony," which has been in progress since the 1st, is the first team exhibition held by the institution after relocating and reopening from Sogyeok-dong to Wonseo-dong. All of the entries are titled "The Great Chapbook 4 - Holy" (2023). NOH Sangho imagined himself to be a blind man.The work process is like translating a virtual ghost into a real language. I remembered the miraculous things that happen at the boundary between the two worlds. It is about digital images caused by technical errors or accidental marks made by hands. The artist's mind, which gives materiality to the non-substantial, resembles the desire of those who pursue mystical beliefs.
Virtual becomes reality, and reality sanctifies virtuality. While the screen mimics tactile reality, the painter is struggling for illusion. NOH Sangho often uses airbrushes these days. It is a tool that sprays paint in the form of a spray instead of a brush. You can hide the traces of your hands in moderation to get a digital-like smooth screen. On the other hand, thick textured materials such as special pigments and gypsum are sometimes applied to the screen. It is a paradoxical attempt to emphasize the materiality of painting in contrast to digital.
The largest-scale entry is a painting drawn on two canvases side by side (Figure 1). Colorful iconography fills the canvas. If you look closely at the connection of the screen, you will notice a little out of sync. In the process of expanding the size of the painting, Noh Sang-ho thought about how to maintain the basic units of each day. After dividing one screen into several sections, each of them worked with a day of time. As a result, there was a time difference in each part. There was a difference in expression and a change in thinking. I thought it was meaningful to highlight the difference. Therefore, the screen boundary is not completely connected.
The picture of a large-eyed house is a superimposed picture of a residential area and a person found on the Internet (Figure 2). In the process of combining two unrelated images, the artist's subjective imagination intervenes. Pink heart-shaped iconography are stacked like leaves at the bottom left of the screen. It is a picture drawn by artificial intelligence (AI). After entering certain phrases into the AI program to obtain a digital image, it was drawn by hand.In another screen, a rabbit drawn through collaboration with AI appears (Figure 3). It is a aspect of solving concerns about the subject of creation in the digital age in its own way.
#Swimming today's virtual reality
Smoke from the chimney shakes like a brilliant advertising balloon (Figure 4). Dancing balloons, often seen for a while, are now unfamiliar. Today's advertisement is on YouTube channels, on Instagram feeds, and there is no reason for that balloon to dance because it is hard to make a bigger profit from the waist dance of an Internet article. I don't miss much. The world changes. At the beginning of the virtual reality era, we hesitate as much as our curiosity. As always with the mysterious. NOH Sangho's painting seems to be talking. Our world is already like this. So let's try to swim as hard as we can.
