Dew Point
Young Ho Jeong

The exhibition title, “dew point”, refers to the threshold temperature at which water vapour in the air condenses into droplets. Borrowing this concept, the artist defines the world he has physically experienced as the ‘inside’, and the world of others encountered through digital media as the ‘outside’, visually exploring the ‘temperature difference’ between the two.

TVs, smartphones, and computer monitors that we use in daily life are like transparent windows where this temperature difference condenses. Jeong regards these not only as boundaries dividing reality and the virtual, but also as sensory channels connecting the individual with the external world. The RGB pixels that repeatedly appear in his work result from close-up shots of smartphone screens, visually revealing the boundary between the object beyond the screen and the digital surface. While everyone may have a different first memory of recognising the world through units of pixels, I recall, as a child when visual media were scarce, peering into the monitor and imagining the presence of someone inside the screen of a cathode-ray tube TV. When a favourite scene came on, I tried to preserve the memory by recording it on videotape or photographing the TV screen with a film camera. But the printed photos often had blurred, shimmering pixels, and a black line running across the centre of the screen, leaving the “memory” in a distorted form.

Such visual experiences evoke not only a desire to preserve images but also remind us of the gap between reality and media. However, in today’s digital environment, we no longer question the world beneath the monitor’s surface. Images, music, and videos are produced and consumed in real time within the digital, and sharing with others happens instantaneously. People now attempt to complete the “self who experienced” something by posting what they saw and felt in real life online. Sometimes, high-resolution and clear images explain one’s memories more precisely. Scenes encountered repeatedly make us believe they were our own experiences. In this era where the boundaries between virtuality and reality are overlapped, distinguishing the authenticity of experience is becoming ever more complex and ambiguous.

Young Ho Jeong focuses on the origins of photographs he has taken himself and images floating in the virtual world amid this current. Photographs begin in physical reality, that is, the ‘inside’, while images collected from social media are data based on the ‘outside’. Rather than trying to distinguish between these two media, he focuses on the shifts in perception that occur during the process of experiencing each. The flickering light in front of closed eyes, the outside beyond the glass window, the online data transmitted through a monitor all connect through the human brain, the inside of a window, and the boundary of reality. The newspapers appearing in this exhibition, along with the cathode-ray TVs, represent traditional media that once stood for the external world prior to digital. His photographs juxtaposed against these newspapers become a device that dramatically highlights the temperature difference between reality and the digital world, like dew forming on a pane of glass. Dew Point questions anew the shape and boundary of what we call experience through these ‘condensed images’ that arise at this very point.