Chu Mirim (b. 1982) uses the everyday environments in which contemporary people live as an interface, setting them within the contexts of the web and the city, and documenting them through paintings and video works. She combines or repeats geometric shapes extracted from the rectangular pixels—the smallest unit of a digital screen—and the city structures viewed from satellite maps, creating landscapes where these two spaces intersect.

Chu Mirim’s early work, the ‘Pixel Space’ (2008–2013) series, assigns new meaning to the literal definition of a pixel. This series originated from the artist’s personal experience of leaving Korea to live in Paris. Surrounded by a new culture and language, she felt like a tiny dot in a vast world, and her small apartment paradoxically felt spacious due to her sense of loneliness.

Whenever she felt isolated in a foreign land, she was able to connect with family and friends in Korea through the internet. However, the moment she logged out, she was confronted with the stark reality of her solitude, leaving her with a deep sense of emptiness. This experience led her to question the boundaries between online and offline spaces.

The ‘Pixel Space’ begins as a narrative about events unfolding within the web (space), projecting the individual’s existence onto a tiny dot (pixel). Chu reinterpreted the flood of real-time information in online spaces through her own filters, translating it into simple line drawings on paper. She then layered vibrant paper blocks, representing data pixels, on top of these drawings.

Since 2014, Chu Mirim has been creating works that depict landscapes of the cities she has lived in—Bundang, Seoul, Paris, and Versailles—viewed from perspectives beyond human vision using Google Earth. First presented in her second solo exhibition, 《P.O.I (Point of Interest)》, at Space Willing N Dealing, these works go beyond simple representations of cities, transforming into unique maps that merge her personal experiences and memories.

Through the geometric and abstract cityscapes observed via Google Earth, the artist sought to capture aesthetic beauty while also expressing the emotions and nostalgia she felt for the places she once inhabited. She translated these digital perspectives into analog formats, using paper as a medium to soften the cold, detached quality of digital media. In doing so, her work conveys a sense of warmth and intimacy.

In today's digitalized world, memories and personal experiences are converted into digital data, stored as files, and shared via the internet. Within this shifting landscape—where even the way we remember is evolving—Chu Mirim’s work serves as an attempt to reconnect with memory in new ways.

In her 2016 solo exhibition, 《New modules born from a rippling grid》, held at Trunk Gallery, Chu Mirim presented stencil-based works inspired by the grid—a virtual guideline embedded in design tools. As both an artist and a designer, the grid is deeply intertwined with her life, functioning as a framework that defines her way of seeing and structuring the world.

Chu Mirim observed a striking similarity between the ever-growing buildings in urban landscapes and the constant generation of new information on the web. In response, she visualized both cityscapes and digital landscapes as modular forms constructed from grids.

For this body of work, she treated the grid as a fluid and transformable structure, engaging in sculptural experimentation by assembling geometric units into ever-evolving new modules. Her process involved first designing the forms digitally, then printing them with an inkjet printer, cutting out sections by hand, and applying acrylic paint with a sponge through the stencil templates. With the works, she also exhibited the stencil templates themselves.

The rippling modules in her works, resembling waves on a water’s surface, echo the transient nature of urban landscapes and the endlessly shifting flow of information on the web—constantly forming, dissolving, and reforming.

The fluidity of digital data in Chu Mirim’s work extends beyond the confines of the canvas frame, expanding into physical space. Her 2019 installation 9 Color Spectrum, presented at the 《Two Pillars and Seven Letters》 at the Seoul Museum of Art, exemplified this spatial extension of data’s dynamic nature.

This exhibition examined contemporary society’s blind adherence to accumulated data and statistics—ranging from real estate prices and stock market trends to Bitcoin, astrology, and fortune-telling—despite their validity being limited to specific contexts and purposes. Chu Mirim, in particular, focused on how the criteria and principles of Feng shui theory have evolved over time in response to changing environments. 

For her installation, she divided the exhibition space into a spectrum of nine colors derived from Feng shui theory elements. She then layered all the color spectrums onto walls and floors, reflecting the movement of electromagnetic waves during data transmission and the shape of pixels occupying digital storage.

Chu Mirim’s early works were rooted in the cities she had lived in—personal places imbued with a sense of longing. However, over time, her practice expanded into site-specific works that engage with the geographical features and unique landscapes of the exhibition venues themselves. 

In 《Young Korean Artists 2023》, held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Gwacheon, she presented paintings and video works inspired by the satellite view of Gwacheon’s topography and landmarks, the route from her studio to the museum, the surrounding landscapes visible along the way, urban boundaries, and the museum’s internal structure. 

One of these works, Lamp and ramp (2023), was installed on an inclined pedestal, encouraging viewers to look down at it as if observing from a satellite’s perspective. Additionally, multiple projected dots from a ceiling projector move around the artwork, creating their own trajectories. These small pixel-like dots symbolize the artist or viewers as they navigate and experience the museum.

Alongside Lamp and ramp (2023), Chu Mirim also presented Fruit and stream (2023), a work that transforms Gwacheon’s satellite-view landscape into geometric shapes and expresses them as a delicate low-relief composition through layered paper. The scenery of Gwacheon depicted throughout the overall piece appears either shrunken, as if seen from a satellite, or magnified, as if viewed through an endoscope.

By shifting between scales of enlargement and reduction, moving between digital and analog mediums, and blending video with painting, her works invite viewers to re-examine and reflect on their everyday surroundings from new perspectives.

Chu Mirim, in the same year, explored the everyday life of a data-driven society at her solo exhibition 《Chaos Kong》 at BAIK ART Seoul. The exhibition focused on how invisible digital data has seamlessly integrated into all aspects of our lives. The catalyst for the exhibition was the experience of the 2022 data center fire in Pangyo, which disrupted services. This event made the artist realize that, despite lacking a tangible form, an overwhelming amount of data operates and is interconnected with every facet of our daily lives.

This realization led the artist to understand that data linked to smartphones had become an external brain, storing memories and controlling the scope of one’s actions.

In the exhibition, she embodied the server error known as "Chaos Kong" to bring incomplete data existing on the web into the physical space of the gallery. She began by examining the corruption and loss of data she had personally generated and backed up since 2001, using the act of physically backing up the files that had failed to sync as a way to create her artwork.

Using pixels and grids, the backed-up data are brought together in the gallery to form a "data city" through painting, collage, and video installations. Additionally, by pairing video works with their corresponding screenshots transferred onto flat surfaces, the artist proposed a new form of backup and sought to evoke the everyday life of a data-driven society.

In this way, Chu Mirim delves into the invisible web-based society and the life forms of individuals living within it. Through a practice that oscillates between digital and analog, she visualizes the unseen digital landscape surrounding us. Her work allows us to perceive our everyday life, connected through fluid and imperfect data, with a new sense of awareness.

“I set the everyday surfaces we encounter as a web and a city and am interested in the interfaces that surround these two systems. I aim to express the similarities and transformations of these places and the digital nostalgia and urban sensibilities felt on their surfaces. (…)

I want to depict the structure that sustains our daily life while simultaneously controlling it, and the people of our time living interconnected within it.” (Chu Mirim, Seoul Museum of Art 〈2024 NANJI Access: Premiere〉 Interview, July 30, 2024)

Chu Mirim received a BFA from Dankook University and studied at Ecole des Beaux-arts de Versailles, France. She has held solo exhibitions at BAIK ART (Seoul, 2023), The Great Collection (Seoul, 2022), Gallery LUX (Seoul, 2020), Trunk Gallery (Seoul, 2016), Space Willing N Dealing (Seoul, 2014), Steph Galerie (Singapore, 2013), and Die Gallery (Seoul, 2010).

Additionally, the artist has participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues such as ThisWeekendRoom (Seoul, 2024), Culture Station 284 (Seoul, 2023), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Gwacheon, 2023), Ulsan Art Museum (Ulsan, 2022), Nikolaj Kunsthal (Copenhagen, 2019), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2018), Art Center Nabi (Seoul, 2012), and Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul, 2009).

Chu has been an artist-in-residence at the SeMA Nanji Studio (2024) and the MMCA Residency Goyang (2021). In 2019, she received the Grand Prize at the Unknown Asia. Her works are part of collections at the MMCA Art Bank, Hanwha Life Dream House, and more.

References

• 추미림, Chu Mirim (Artist Website)
• 다아트, 트렁크 갤러리, 스텐실로 풀어낸 디지털 감수성의 추미림 개인전 열어, 2016.07.05
• 서울시립미술관, 두 개의 기둥과 일곱 개의 글자 (Seoul Museum of Art, Two Pillars and Seven Letters)
• 국립현대미술관, 젊은 모색 2023 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), Young Korean Artists 2023) 
• 아트인사이트, [Opinion] 우리의 삶을 구성하는 데이터를 그려내다 [미술/전시], 2023.08.02
• 서울시립미술관, 추미림 인터뷰: 2024 난지액세스: 프리미어 (Seoul Museum of Art, Chu Mirim Interview: 2024 NANJI Access: Premiere)