Chop a needle fine and stir it into the greens you drink every day. The thin, sharp fragments will wander through the organs, opening fatal wounds. Following the vessels to the heart, they still the pulse and call death — and there is no wound to be seen.Cheon Un-yeong, Needle

Images do not end where they are seen. As in the scene from Cheon Un-yeong’s Needle, where invisible shards circulate inside the body and work in silence, finely divided units of vision touch the circuits of perception without leaving a visible wound, disrupting the rhythm of context. The trace is slight, yet a hairline crack remains at the center of sensation.

In childhood, a toy microscope revealed a world that was a swarm of halftone dots. Later came the grid of pixels, and then the numerics of rendering and generative models that could replace a scene altogether. The unit moved from dot to square, then to computed data; the image shifted from a window that guaranteed reality to an apparatus for rewriting it. Detail grew more exacting, but the boundary by which we tell the true from the false grew more diffuse.

Midore addresses the infiltration and superimposition of these micro-units. As dots, pixels, and texture data translate one another and drift, surface sharpness holds while the focus of perception slowly migrates inward. The aim is not to bolster representational certainty, but to expose the slippage between sensation and conviction, less a matter of sharpness than of legibility, the fine gap between what is seen and what is believed.

Here the image is presented as a texture-modified visual bolus. Viscosity and grain are tuned to aid ingestion (seeing), while the density of meaning is left for viewers to gauge. At the point where familiar visual grammar is subtly retuned, the image’s units pass across the surface and seep into the interior of cognition, and looking foretokens a quiet but irreversible change.

Full Metal Plant is a process of reconsidering the pet plant, in which the natural properties of plants are stripped away, leaving only the characteristics of domesticated plants. It aims to recognize an unfamiliar appearance that has been shaped solely for the sake of human needs and convenience, while being dependent on the category of humans. These plants still retain a semblance of nature in their form, but they are the result of human manipulation rather than interaction with various natural objects.

In this project, the texture of iron, inspired by the movie RoboCop, is applied to the disguised appearance which is not an actual natural look. To implement the potential functionality of domesticated plants, the generative model was fed with sales posts from SNS accounts to create images, which were then rendered with a program to give them the texture of iron. The resulting images show a rigid and fixed form with a cool and hard surface of iron, transforming from their original flexible and fluid appearance. Through this, the project aims to provide an opportunity to reconsider the existence of domesticated plants.

The photograph, which has long been used to convey truth, has acquired a specificity called objectivity. Behind this lies the difficulty of manipulation, sophistication, and the elusive principles that are hard to grasp. However, the increasing ease of advanced editing has begun to dismantle the unique points that only photographs possess, and they are now consumed merely as a medium accompanied by realistic belief and specific emotions.

I emulate the attitude of those who have long sought to reveal the truth of the subject through photography. In order to restore the attribute of objectivity, I have made attempts. Rather than assigning the concept of objectivity from a human perspective to the photograph, I aimed to secure legitimacy through programs as before. To achieve this, I hoped that the photographed subjects would function not as interpretations of existing entities but as incomplete copies mediating a conceptualized world. When a photograph indicating the world is produced through generative models, regardless of the imitation of reality, universality is inherently embedded to reveal objectivity.

The conceptualized world is represented by the city of Hwanggok, appearing in Han Kang’s Black Deer. Visualized based on my emotions, the Hwanggok created through a generative model relied on language to embody the universality of the city. After converting the captured images to black and white, I applied color through a generative model.

As numerous attempts to capture the truth are being ridiculed, the technology of photography is evolving to make editing even easier. Apps that exploit sensuality and stimulation through false packaging are weaving countless impoverished images to converge reality and fiction simultaneously. As a result, the medium of photography, which has long reigned as an indicator of objectivity, is gradually stepping aside but still instills a vague belief through inertia, regardless of the truth.

The reason why photography gains practical belief lies in its ability to evoke the feeling, sensation, and atmosphere of actuality, rather than being a mere imitation of reality. Such photographs function as plausible images, even if they depict fictional spaces or non-existent subjects. The artwork Hwanggok gathers fragments of reality to create a virtual space. The images created based on the motif of the city of Hwanggok in Han Kang’s Black Deer are plausible falsities. The series of processes, involving cutting and implementing images created by programs or taken through photography, fulfils a long-standing desire of the photographer to evoke belief in their existence.