Sungju Ham

Liquid Crystal and Mirrors, Expressionless Faces and Fetishes

“Fear … panic confines … Fear’s healthy, panic’s deadly.”

—Chasing Mavericks, 2012

There’s an undercurrent of fear around the inevitable crises of art, one that feels increasingly accelerated by technologies still seen as “unknown. ” The unknown resists reproduction; it has never been fully grasped, and it can’t be shaped by existing discourses, making it inherently unstable. In a space where art and technology emerge side by side, Sungju turns to the most essential and primal gesture: drawing and places himself willingly at the center of this panic.

In Kernel Panic, Sungju doesn’t just summon his subjects through painting; he also brings into the frame the algorithms that guide him through the screen, and even the moiré [1] patterns that ripple across the surface of his monitor. These new works feel like screens caught in a lag, or like photographs warped through distorted lenses misaligned, off-kilter, and never quite where you expect them to be. [2]

Outside the act of drawing, the world appears to be connected through elegant, spiral-like circuits. But the artist’s digital pathways his searches for imagery are riddled with system friction and cascading errors, delivering images that deviate from the original, each bearing their own kind of glitch. The exhibition title, Kernel Panic, refers to a state in computing when the operating system encounters a fatal error and responds by locking down or rebooting. In the midst of overlapping gazes and digital systems, the show becomes a metonym for the breakdowns of perception, the embodiment of meaning, and the failures of representation that define contemporary art.

1. Sungju’s paintings don’t seem to be made with viewing in mind. Like a private aside, he persistently transfers the images he or perhaps his algorithm has selected, over and over again. There’s a kind of devotion here, a trust in the image that feels unshakable. This kind of looking the gaze isn’t passive; it’s a sudden encounter with something within your field of vision, an experience that arrives unexpectedly, like a strange coincidence. [3]

In The Theory of Desire, Jacques Lacan describes the “mirror stage,” where infants between six and eighteen months old first recognize themselves in a mirror and respond with joy. They assume this reflected image is complete, whole. It becomes a model for the formation of the self a moment when one is seen but doesn’t yet know it. At this stage, there is only looking, not awareness of being looked at. [4]

Gianni Versace Fall series, which covers the gallery walls, becomes something else entirely through this gaze. The subject transforms into a new visual experience for the viewer. But like a mirage, the image recedes just as you try to grasp it. [5] Maybe Sungju’s repeated attempts to draw the same subject are less about capturing it and more about maintaining that space of pursuit a distance that never quite closes.

2. Eroticism has evolved alongside the internet and digital media. The late ’90s and early 2000s when pornography and underground cultures became increasingly mainstream also mark the time when Sungju first encountered screens. The idea of fetishism, which circulated in contemporary art, photography, and film at the time, began to seep into adjacent industries like fashion. Physical features like feet, black hair, and slim waists, along with materials like fur, silk, and leather, became stylized elements of desire. [6] Within this wave, the work of Manfred Thierry Mugler (b. 1948) gained prominence for its provocative, subcultural sensibility. Sungju’s new works mugler 1990, mugler 4, mugler spring, and spring mugler reconstruct Mugler’s designs through processes of deconstruction and digital editing, translating them onto canvas. Other works, like Balenciaga Fall and the Gianni Versace Fall series, take similar cues evoking fetishized objects, symbols of a fantasy to possess and control beauty, elegance, and desire.

These cropped images recall the aesthetics of game character gear or anime outfits, and echo the digital graphic language Sungju has explored over time. Studs, check patterns, and the texture of black leather resemble jagged fragments of desire breaking through the cracks of conscious thought. Even the most solid, imposing walls eventually crumble not through force, but by a subtle, magnetic pull of what they tried to contain.

Sungju refines images that are difficult to rationalize but are nevertheless captivating. These images don’t offer logic or cause they offer raw, unfiltered sensation. This is the kind of primal energy Sungju injects into the subjects he paints.

3. Desire defies understanding. In David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), a group of techno-sexuals believe their reality is built through repeated collisions. The thrill triggered by the fear of death transforms into overwhelming erotic charge. [7] In his painting crash, Sungju captures a road lined with cars an image that alludes to the inevitability of ongoing accidents. These frozen frames, devoid of motion, seem to both advance and retreat. The cars drive endlessly, circling around death, suspended in tension. In crash james, Sungju digitally alters the face of the film’s protagonist, James, with a few simple touchscreen gestures, freezing it in a new, distorted form. Moiré patterns layer over the warped face, blending digital interference with meticulous hand-rendering. Here, Sungju collapses the slick surface of technology and the labor of painting into a single frame. The painting doesn’t just represent it actively reshapes, manipulates, transforms.

In Kernel Panic, Sungju goes as far as to depict the actual glass screens of the iPhones and MacBooks through which he discovers his images. While embracing the limits of representation inherent in drawing, he brings both desire and error to the surface of the canvas.

Risk is always present in any experiment. But safe routes rarely satisfy desire. To veer off track, then, is not necessarily a wrong choice. The thrill of panic the pull of distortion offers Sungju a kind of release, a way to escape the looming sense of crisis in art.

—Ji-eon Lee (Independent Curator)

1 - Moire is a visual interference phenomenon that occurs when the frequency of the recording equipment and the display being filmed differ.

2 - The author referred to recurring end-related terms found in ‘The End of Art’ and ‘The Art of the End’: Notes on Arthur Danto’s The Art of 9/11 Exhibition’ written by Jong-Chul Choi.

3 - Jacques Lacan, Theory of Desire, trans. Taek‐young Kwon, Min‐seung Ki, and Mi‐soon Lee (Seoul: Moonye Publishing, 2004), 33.

4 - Ibid.p.15.

5 - Ibid.p.19.

6 - Song Ji-eun, and So-hyun Kim. “Characteristics of Fetishistic Imagery in Fashion Illustration.” Journal of the Korean Society of Fashion Design, vol. 16, no. 3, 2016, p. 164.

7 - Kim, Namsi, et al. Crash (Seoul;Mediabus), 2023, p. 8.