Installation
view of 《Fever
Eye》 ©SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation and
the Artist. All rights reserved. Photo : Jihyun JungSONGEUN is presenting 《Fever Eye》, a solo exhibition by Ahram Kwon, the Grand Prize winner of the
21st SONGEUN Art Award, on view until August 9.
Ahram Kwon has explored the screen as a subject, moving beyond
the habitual gaze that focuses solely on images within screens. Grounded in a
critical examination of rapidly evolving media, her media installations—using
LED, screens, video, and sound—disrupt sensory perception and overturn visual
recognition. Following her Grand Prize win at 《The 21st SONGEUN Art
Award Exhibition》 (2021–2022), she returns to SONGEUN
after three years to debut new work.
In this exhibition, Kwon investigates the sensory landscape
shaped by a future led by technology—where machines see more clearly while
human vision dims. She examines how this vision-driven future overheats
present-day systems and leads to widespread social side effects.
From CCTV cameras monitoring the city to LiDAR sensors that
guide autonomous vehicles, and dataset training for image learning, Kwon
questions how today’s hypervisual perception—translating physical reality into
image data—will shape the future.
Installation
view of 《Fever
Eye》 ©SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation and
the Artist. All rights reserved. Photo : Jihyun JungThe newly unveiled work Fever
Eye (2025), which shares its title with the exhibition, serves as the
central piece that runs through the entire show. It begins by capturing the
image of a human drifting through endless platforms and channels within an
ecosystem where the boundaries between information and products, technology and
capital, have become increasingly blurred.
The LED panels that encircle the
third-floor exhibition space emit a vivid red hue—reminiscent of screen
errors—symbolically evoking an overheated present and acting as both visual and
conceptual anchors for the exhibition.
Kwon’s earlier work
Walls (2021), presented at 《The 21st SONGEUN Art
Award Exhibition》, marked her first use of LED
panels. By combining fragmented screens with mirrors, the piece offered a
symbolic visualization of the screen as the target of desire in a capitalist
society.
Installation
view of 《Fever
Eye》 ©SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation and
the Artist. All rights reserved. Photo : Jihyun JungThe new work The Backrooms (2025), presented
on the second basement floor of the exhibition, expands upon Kwon’s previous
work Walls, exploring the anxiety and sensory confusion that
arise at the boundary between reality and the virtual. Inspired by “The
Backrooms”—an internet-born urban legend describing infinite, narrow, and
disorienting spaces where reality and fiction blur—Kwon transforms SONGEUN’s
underground gallery into a physical embodiment of the liminal space shaped by
repetition and distortion of familiar environments and the accumulation of
source-less images.
Through this, the artist visualizes the structure of a world in
which soulless media controls perception, cognition, reason, and emotion, while
also sculpting the psychological unease toward a system always on the brink of
malfunction. For Kwon, the screen is not merely a device for projecting images
but a complex and structural site where sensory impulses and the breakdown of
meaning occur. It functions not as a passive conveyor of images across a flat
surface but as a volatile arena where conflicting desires are mediated.
