Engineered Nostalgia

So Young Moon (Independent Curator)

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Does something become important because it is visible, or is it considered important because it has been placed at the center? In the 1966 British film Blow-Up, the protagonist Thomas becomes fascinated by a possible crime scene he missed while taking photographs. As he enlarges the image to confirm his suspicion and verify what is there, the photograph becomes ambiguous, and his doubt deepens. The further his investigation proceeds, the more the image turns into abstraction rather than evidence. The closer he comes to the truth, the farther it seems to recede. Digital images share a similar nature. High-resolution images present hyperrealistic figures that dissolve into pixels when enlarged, erasing their context. The technical image resists reality while claiming meaning through fiction itself. Thomas is the name of doubt. Was what I saw really there? In a world where seeing is not always believing, an era has arrived in which persuasion matters more than presence. After years of debate over how to navigate an overwhelming flood of information, we have entered an age in which AI and algorithms organize, sort, and prioritize information on our behalf. Against this hierarchy of images shaped by technical perception, Ejae Park questions and distances herself from it in Blow-Up.

The development of digital photography has shortened the time needed to capture moments as images. Images and scenes can now be easily recorded and shared. As recording and sharing have accelerated, so has our engagement with images. Most images are consumed rapidly and prioritize efficiency over diversity, leading to faster consumption. AI narrows categories through algorithms, continuously presenting users with what they are likely to like, agree with, or have consumed before. Rather than expanding one's world, it narrows it around a presumed self. Mechanical vision has no room for coincidence. Park focuses on this blind spot in technical perception. She enlarges snapshots and found footage, cropping fragments from them. Most of these fragments come from beyond the image's main subject. What the artist calls the “periphery” is not simply an overlooked detail but an area pushed aside as noise by the logic of the digital image. As vegetable scraps trimmed away during cooking or cookie dough left outside a cutter's edge, these fragments may have been neglected, yet they remain part of the information and still carry meaning. It is difficult to tell where they came from or what the original image looked like. Rather than losing meaning, they become detached from hierarchy, existing as image, as painting.

Park blows up the image until its original context fades. She moves deeper into the vast screen, pushing forward until there is nowhere further to go. As the image expands, form gradually dissolves into an immaterial plane of pixels, and noise takes over the surface. The titles of the paintings correspond to the resolution of the cropped images. Park approaches these pixelated fragments as sculptural forms. When removed from their original structure, the images are translated onto the canvas as new units, forming paintings. Detached from that structure, the fragments unfold new narratives as individual units. The grains, delicately built up on the surface with ceramic medium, appear virtual yet inevitably acquire thickness. This materiality restores density to the periphery that once floated in the background. But her practice is not simply an attempt to translate a virtual image into painting. Rather, Park steps back from the familiar structure produced by the mechanical gaze. She tries to look at images on her own terms, reconsidering the elements within them and viewing them with a more even regard. Through enlarging, cropping, and editing, the original context gradually fades. Yet the images, once classified by importance, are returned to the surface on equal terms. Park's attempt to reposition peripheral images as subjects can be found in her earlier series, FLAW (2024). While inspecting defects before moving out, Park discovered distinct forms and personalities in the traces left behind in the space and began to question why certain things were classified as things that should disappear. Aware of the hierarchy that emerges through experience and learning, Park remains cautious of trained ways of seeing. Through a near-devotional act of drawing, Park carefully gives these traces material presence, restoring them as monuments to lived experience. In Blow-Up, she extends this perspective into the digital environment and carries it into a discourse on painting.

Park questions the hierarchy constructed by mechanical vision and asks what it means to have one's own way of seeing. Yet even without machine vision, hierarchy may be an unavoidable condition of the image. As mentioned earlier, such hierarchies do not always arise from social or conventional conditions but are often formed unconsciously through personal experience and individual values. While painting and analog photography allowed such visual orders to emerge in more complex and nuanced ways, digital images often construct them on arbitrary assumptions. For example, the automatic background-removal function on a smartphone analyzes an image pixel by pixel, examining borders, shapes, lighting, and context to separate the object from the background. However, this system begins to break down when the image is enlarged. As forms become ambiguous, it no longer makes sense to determine what is subject and what is background. Nevertheless, the machine does not give up on dividing the ambiguous surface. In its effort to extract the subject from empty space, it begins to examine the periphery with greater precision. What has been pushed into the background becomes the object of analysis once again. Park focuses on this structural contradiction within the technical image. She repeatedly multiplies the fictional boundaries and forms generated by automatic background removal. The image no longer functions as a representation of an object. Instead, it begins to reveal itself through material and surface.

The long-standing argument over machines and artistic aura continues today. Yet the question has shifted with the rise of AI. No longer is it simply a question of whether machines can reproduce human techniques; it is now a question of who gets to think and who gets to see. Algorithms shape perception not through force but through the subtle appeal of personal taste and convenience. The selection of information occurs before judgment, quietly determining the conditions under which judgment becomes possible. What has been filtered out leaves no trace. Remaining invisible, it can no longer be evaluated, questioned, or recognized. Technical images are produced by systems designed by machines, so they seem to capture the moment we want, yet they can only work within the limits set by the device itself. However, painting leaves room for unexpected novelty. Coincidence makes the familiar feel odd, unfolding an invisible scape as a visual narrative. Even when attempting to reproduce a digital image on canvas, an artist’s brushwork and ingrained habits inevitably reveal something human. Rather than escaping digital images or positioning herself against them, Park attempts to reclaim her own way of seeing and thinking. The eyes not only look but also embrace the world. Seeing happens when experience encounters an image. In painting, these gestures elaborate one's own gaze and movement. But can we still say this is free from technical thinking? With this question, Park holds onto the image in a prolonged gaze before it flutters away with the passage of time.