Critical Hit (b. 1988) records the voices of socially marginalized individuals through a range of media including painting, drawing, and video, while revealing the realities in which these lives are omitted or distorted within biased social structures. Centering practices of solidarity and direct engagement in the field, the artist has developed a visual language that confronts social inequality and hierarchical systems.

In her early works, Critical Hit sought to overturn existing systems that sustain discriminatory orders while attempting to construct alternative worldviews. For example, in the 2016 solo exhibition 《News Feed》, the artist drew attention to contemporary events overlooked by mainstream public media through the small and personal voices circulating on social media platforms, translating them into drawings.
 
At the time, incidents including the ongoing calls to uncover the truth behind the Sewol Ferry Disaster were unfolding one after another. Encountering these stories through Facebook, Critical Hit began drawing in the hope that such voices would not simply disappear or fade away.
 
She first gathered posts from her Facebook news feed that felt too urgent to ignore — events that demanded solidarity, carried pressing significance, or contained crucial social contexts. She then researched articles and photographs related to each incident, reconstructing texts and images marked by distinctly personal perspectives into her drawings.

On Facebook, the news feed is quickly filled with new posts and advertisements the moment one looks away, causing previous stories to be swept aside and forgotten. Critical Hit saw in this rapid cycle of overwriting, replacement, and forgetting a resemblance to the ways social incidents themselves disappear from public consciousness.
 
Through her drawings, the artist attempted to hold onto the events and voices that continuously receded from the timeline like an ebbing tide each day, preserving these social incidents as collective memories that would not be so easily washed away.

In the following year’s solo exhibition 《Make up Dash》, Critical Hit appropriated the technique of “makeup” to call attention to fixed perceptions surrounding women and queer individuals, while proposing another mode of solidarity with them. The project began from the artist’s experience of watching makeup-related content on YouTube and feeling a sense of discomfort toward it.
 
In beauty YouTube channels primarily targeting women, phrases such as “being loved by your boyfriend,” “plastic surgery makeup,” and “being pretty is everything” appeared repeatedly. The artist recalls feeling that these messages framed women’s appearance as a form of “competitiveness,” creating pressure to become beautiful by any means necessary.

These uncomfortable aspects, however, were not simply problems inherent to individual YouTubers, but rather stemmed from broader social standards that define “femininity.” Within socially constructed ideals of beauty, women are expected to wear makeup while appearing as though they are not wearing any at all, while at the same time being expected to maintain bare faces that look flawlessly made-up and without blemish.
 
Critical Hit critically examines these standards, which operate with particular harshness toward women, and appropriates the format of beauty YouTubers’ broadcasts as a way of moving through and exposing their contradictions. Through this strategy, the artist attempts to transform formats that reproduce discrimination and hatred into structures capable of revision, intervention, and change.

In the resulting work ‘Makeup Dash’ series (2017), Critical Hit becomes a beauty YouTuber herself, presenting one makeup look each week while using the process as a platform to discuss women’s rights and gender equality. At first glance, her channel appears little different from those of other beauty creators, yet the purpose of her makeup is not to appeal to or please others.
 
For instance, through different makeup concepts, the artist addresses social and political issues: resisting discrimination and hatred (Struggle makeup), exposing the marginalization of female characters relegated to supporting roles (Doraemon Makeup), and questioning the foundation market dominated by shades labeled “No. 21” and “No. 23” (Thoughts on No. 25).
 
In this sense, ‘Make up Dash’ attempts to subvert what society defines as the most “feminine” act — makeup itself — in order to challenge the norms associated with femininity.
 
At the same time, the artist also used makeup to confront prejudices embedded within a world divided rigidly between male and female identities. During queer festivals held throughout the project period, she expressed solidarity through works such as Rainbow Makeup, while Drag King Makeup — created by a heterosexual cisgender woman seeking to explore her own masculinity — challenged the logic of gender binaries.

The 2019 video work Sylvanian Familism by Critical Hit likewise centers on themes of solidarity. Using Sylvanian Families animal figurines, the artist created a puppet theater grounded in a feminist perspective. Reconfiguring the toy franchise’s original worldview — which idealized the conventional nuclear family — she introduced a community inhabited by diverse minorities and marginalized identities.
 
Through this work, the artist proposes the possibility of people with different backgrounds and attributes living together, while attempting an artistic intervention aimed at envisioning a society free from discrimination.

Meanwhile, following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Critical Hit began producing works that visualize the everyday lives of minorities made even more vulnerable by disaster. Emerging from this context, the 2021 solo exhibition 《Disaster Drawing》 articulated the unequal social structures revealed through the disaster of COVID-19 by borrowing the format of an illustrated catalogue or encyclopedia.
 
Through the lives of minorities who inevitably become the most vulnerable in times of crisis, the artist exposes how social systems had already been excluding certain individuals long before the disaster itself, and how the pandemic merely functioned as a catalyst that made these preexisting inequalities visible.

The drawing project ‘Disaster Drawing,’ which shares its title with the exhibition, takes the form of a “catalogue,” yet it is not concerned with explaining how the coronavirus emerged or what kinds of quarantine systems were implemented to contain it.
 
Instead, Critical Hit collects fragments of unequal social structures that were exposed through the pandemic as a catalyst, documenting the problems faced by those living within vulnerable social conditions.

The 2022 solo exhibition 《Under the Paper》, held at Post Territory Ujeongguk, extended the ‘Disaster Drawing’ project by examining the problems that emerged as an unequal society began to collapse under the disaster of COVID-19.
 
In particular, through this exhibition, Critical Hit sought to consider what kinds of unresolved knots a community must confront first when attempting to respond to a pandemic through technology and politics alone, without practices of mourning or solidarity.

Beyond the material simplicity implied by the phrase “under the paper,” Critical Hit sought to address the realities faced by minorities who can prove their existence only through official documents, as well as broader social conditions in which entire lives are reduced to a single sheet of paper.
 
This includes the reality of unhoused individuals who could eat only by presenting weekly negative COVID test certificates, migrants who were required to produce health insurance cards in order to purchase public masks, and families forced to turn away from nursing homes after staring only at official notices posted on the doors, unable to see their loved ones.
 
By recalling those forgotten beneath the slogans of recovery and healing, Critical Hit visualizes the conditions they endured, ultimately asking what values must not be forgotten in order to rebuild a sense of community after disaster.

Furthermore, through the ‘PENINSULA ELEGY’ series (2024), Critical Hit turned her attention to the grief experienced by those who continue mourning and commemorating victims within a Korean society that neglects collective recovery from disasters and conceals the truth surrounding such tragedies.
 
Through the emotional framework of the “elegy” — a form associated with lamentation and mourning for the dead — the artist repositions grief, often dismissed as a merely private or minor emotion, as an indispensable process of collective remembrance.

‘PENINSULA ELEGY’ approaches the various forms of sorrow experienced by members of communities mourning social disasters through the emotional framework of the “elegy.” By revealing different kinds and stages of grief, the project broadens the spectrum through which sorrow can be understood, proposing grief as an essential and natural process necessary for sustaining memory and remembrance.
 
In this series, Critical Hit recalls onto paper the Sewol Ferry Disaster, the Seoul Halloween crowd crush, and the hidden realities exposed during the pandemic period. For instance, in the work 너무 미안하고 당신들이 세상을 바꿨어요. (I’m So Sorry, and You Changed the World) (2024), the artist redraws the Post-it messages left behind by citizens following the Itaewon tragedy.
 
The handwriting, spelling, pressure of the pen, and even the crumpled condition of the notes are carefully reproduced, evoking the memories and emotions of that moment.

In this way, Critical Hit has continued to expose the unstable systems underlying social disasters and tragedies, while visualizing the lives of minorities made even more vulnerable by them. Her practice retrieves and revives fragments of memory that are gradually forgotten and omitted within a contemporary society that consumes and absorbs social catastrophe as spectacle, ultimately creating a space in which collective mourning can take place.

“I am experimenting with ways in which art can intervene materially in the foundations of everyday life.” (Critical Hit, Artist’s Note)

Critical Hit graduated from the Department of Painting at Sejong University. Her solo exhibitions include 《PENINSULA ELEGY, Requiem》 (Mihakgwan Philosopher's Stone, Seoul, 2024), 《PENINSULA ELEGY》 (Space Imsi, Incheon, 2024), 《Under the Paper》 (Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, 2022), and 《Disaster Drawing》 (Space Imsi, Incheon, 2021).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Who Is Your Family?》 (Jeju National University Museum, Kyungpook National University Art Museum, Kunsan National University Museum of Art, Jeju, Daegu, Gunsan, 2025), 《MAY DAY MAY DAY MAY DAY》 (111CM Community, Suwon, 2024), the 2023 Gwangju Media Art Festival (Gwangju Media Art Platform, Gwangju, 2023), 《So-Called Normal Family》 (Suwon Museum of Art, Suwon, 2023), 《Vita Nova_New Life》 (Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2022), and 《Follow, Flow, Feed》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2020).
 
Critical Hit participated in the 2025 residency program at Incheon Art Platform, and her works are included in the collections of the MMCA Art Bank and the Yangju City Chang Ucchin Museum of Art.

References

• 치명타, Critical Hit (Artist’s Website)
• 인천아트플랫폼, 치명타 (Incheon Art Platform, Critical Hit)
• 공간해방, [전시 개요 및 작가 노트] 뉴스피드 (Space Haebang, [Exhibition Overview & Artist’s Note] News Feed)
• 문래예술공장, [작가 노트] 메이크업 대쉬 (Mullae Art Factory, [Artist’s Note] Make up Dash)
• 영화공간 주안, [전시 개요] 실바니안 패밀리즘 (Cine Space Juan, [Exhibition Overview] Sylvanian Familism)
• 임시공간, [전시 개요 및 작가 노트] 재난도감 (Space Imsi, [Exhibition Overview & Artist’s Note] Disaster Drawing)
• 탈영역우정국, [전시 개요 및 작가 노트] Under the Paper 종이 아래 (Post Territory Ujeongguk, [Exhibition Overview & Artist’s Note] Under the Paper)
• 미학관, [전시 개요 및 서문] 반도 엘레지, 레퀴엠 (MIHAKGWAN Philosopher's Stone, [Exhibition Overview & Preface] PENINSULA ELEGY, Requiem)