Han Jinsu’s solo exhibition《Ddeum: A Pregnant Pause》is being held as the reopening exhibition of Art Center Nabi. The exhibition takes place at its new space in Sagan-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, from June 12 to August 1.
 
The exhibition offers a condensed view of the issues that kinetic installation artist Han Jinsu has long explored: movement, time, chance, and generation. Across the exhibition space, wires, mechanical devices, liquids, and repeatedly moving structures unfold like a single ecosystem. Rather than focusing on completed forms, the artist pays attention to the state just before a phenomenon occurs, and to the moment when order and uncertainty operate together.

The exhibition title, “Ddeum,” clearly reflects this attitude. In Korean, “ddeum” refers to a period of waiting in which something is not rushed to completion, but is left to change slowly from within. The English subtitle, ‘A Pregnant Pause’, also carries this meaning. It suggests not a simple halt, but a charged pause just before a new change begins.

Han Jinsu’s work does not emphasize the speed and efficiency of technology. Instead, it reveals unpredictable movements and flows of sensation generated by mechanical devices.
 
 
 
The Process of Generation Rather Than the Result
 
Han Jinsu has long moved across painting, sculpture, installation, and kinetic art, exploring structures of generation created through matter and movement. This exhibition, too, is not one that presents completed results.
 
Upon entering the exhibition space, viewers encounter countless wires spilling from a mechanical device on the wall down to the floor, while small structures move subtly above a black liquid. The machines are operating, but their movements are never entirely predictable. What the viewer encounters is not a single completed form, but a state that continues to change.
 
The artist pays attention not to the result, but to the “conditions of occurrence.” He seeks to capture subtle moments generated between order and disorder, necessity and chance, control and uncertainty.

How Does a Machine Move Like a Living Being?
 
What is interesting about Han Jinsu’s work is that it does not foreground the spectacle of advanced technology.
 
While many forms of media art today focus on visually demonstrating the development of AI and digital technology, Han instead creates movements that resemble living organisms through simple mechanical devices and repetitive motion.
 
A machine moves according to rules. Yet when those rules encounter the environment and accidental variables, unpredictable phenomena arise. At that moment, the machine no longer appears to be merely a device, but something closer to a living organism.
 
This exhibition focuses precisely on that boundary: the possibility of life that exists between machine and nature, the artificial and the organic, order and chaos.
 
 
 
The Time of “Ddeum”
 
The exhibition title symbolically reveals the artist’s attitude. In Korean, “ddeum” refers to the process of turning off the heat after cooking and leaving food for a while so that change continues slowly from within. It is not a matter of rushing something to completion, but of waiting for it to mature on its own.
 
The English subtitle, ’A Pregnant Pause’, carries the same meaning. It is not a simple stop, but a brief pause just before something new comes into being. Although a completed form has not yet appeared, change has already begun inside.
 
Han Jinsu’s exhibition takes this very “state of waiting” as the condition of the work. Technological elements such as mechanical devices, circuits, movement, and data appear in the exhibition, but they function less as tools for producing quick results than as devices that create an environment in which unpredictable changes can occur. Rather than fully controlling things, the artist allows matter, machines, time, and chance to respond to one another.
 
What matters in this exhibition, therefore, is not the novelty of technology itself. Rather than asking what technology can immediately produce, the exhibition asks viewers to observe what kinds of changes slowly take place within the process. In an age accustomed to efficiency and speed, Han Jinsu’s work invites us to pause, wait, and look into a state that has not yet been determined.
 
Ultimately,《Ddeum: A Pregnant Pause》is an exhibition that focuses on the time of process rather than on completed results. Through scenes in which machines, matter, data, and chance become entangled, the artist shows the time in which something changes on its own. The core of this exhibition is not a grand declaration about future technology, but the act of remaining with and observing a state that cannot be quickly concluded.

Artist
 
Han Jinsu is a multimedia artist based in Seoul. Working primarily with painting, sculpture, kinetic art, and installation, he explores structures of generation produced through material change and mechanical movement. In recent years, he has constructed situations that are closer to the “conditions of occurrence” than to finished results, using simple materials and repetitive devices. Through these works, he reveals subtle flows of sensation that tremble between necessity and chance, order and uncertainty.
 
The artist has continued to create works that remain for a long time in an “undetermined state” through various media. His representative works include Painting Formation Machine (2014–), which delays completion through endless brushstrokes; White Pond (2007–), an installation in which traces of generation and disappearance occur simultaneously on a shallow surface of water; and Flower of Uncertainty (2022–), in which black bubbles drift without a center and continuously leave traces. Flower of Uncertainty was presented at the Changwon Sculpture Biennale in 2022.

Art Center Nabi
 
Art Center Nabi was founded in 2000 in the SK Seorin Building in Seorin-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul. Since then, it has continued to organize exhibitions, education programs, research, and international exchange centered on the intersection of art and technology. The institution has addressed major agendas in technology-based art from an early stage, including artificial intelligence, robotics, interactive media, and network culture.
 
In particular, Art Center Nabi has expanded the possibilities of new media within the contemporary technological environment, functioning as an experimental platform where artists, engineers, designers, architects, and humanities researchers come together and exchange ideas.