Installation view of 《The Unflattening Mandate》 © Lazy Mike Gallery
Lazy Mike presents 《The Unflattening Mandate》, a group
exhibition featuring Eunsi Jo, Hyerin Lee, Moohyun Jo, Seongguk Cho, and Yewon
Seo, on view through July 11.
Within this smartened world, sensations,
relationships, memories, and tastes are increasingly compressed into data and
reaction values. Through painting and sculpture, the five artists reopen the
surface of a flattened world, restoring the density of body, time, material,
and sensation in their own ways.
Installation view of 《The Unflattening Mandate》 © Lazy Mike Gallery
The exhibition title, 《The Unflattening Mandate》, is inspired by
The Smartness Mandate by Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell.
In the book, the authors describe “smartness” not simply as a technological
advancement, but as an epistemology that organizes the world into
data—something to be calculated, managed, and rendered predictable.
The first image of a black hole, released
in 2019, serves as a powerful illustration of how this smart world operates.
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT) project linked radio telescopes
across the globe, transforming the planet itself into a single sensing
apparatus. From vast quantities of data, signals were selected, noise was
filtered out, and a unified image was ultimately produced.
While this remarkably clear image stands as
a scientific achievement, it also prompts a critical question: what remains
within the image, and what is excluded from it?
Installation view of 《The Unflattening Mandate》 © Lazy Mike Gallery
《The Unflattening Mandate》 begins precisely at this point. The smart world increasingly
compresses emotions and relationships, memories and preferences into responses,
connections, storage, and patterns. Clicks and scrolling replace complex
sensory experiences with rapid metrics of engagement, while images circulate as
smooth, consumable surfaces.
In response, the exhibition turns its
attention to the slow temporality and material persistence inherent in painting
and sculpture. If painting functions as a kind of “time battery,” storing
residual sensations and releasing them again across time, sculpture anchors
compressed experiences back into space through its material body.
The works of the five participating artists
do not seek to mend or smooth over the flattened surface of the world. Instead,
each opens it slightly wider in a different way, allowing the bodies,
temporalities, materialities, and sensations compressed within it to seep back
into view.
Participating Artists: Eunsi Jo,
Hyerin Lee, Moohyun Jo, Seongguk Cho, Yewon Seo
