Ji-Min Park

When light lands on the retina, it disrupts regimes of perception and can induce a sense of virtuality to its surroundings. Ji-Min Park’s light is blue. Beyond its atmospheric effect, it flattens distances, liquefies textures, and causes Pony’s space to close in around us. Infrastructures resembles a contracted environment, a mental room functioning as a logic of withdrawal, where bodies are only half-present. A kind of offline zone, where what remains is like the image of a phone screen lingering for a few seconds behind our eyelids after we have stared at it too long in the dark. Ji-Min’s display reminds me as much of the rooms that materialize the psyches of Gregg Araki’s characters in Nowhere (1997) as it does of the stereotypical teenager’s bedroom: curtains drawn until mid-afternoon, clothes piled onto a chair until they form an accidental sculpture, or, here too, artificial light gradually replacing daylight. It is an enclosed space from which one constructs a personal mythology while the world keeps turning at a distance, through images and affective projections.

Yet for those who have managed to move beyond their teenage bedroom, one way of returning to that room left on standby is through music. Before our conversation, Ji-Min sent me two tracks by SOPHIE¹ , which I imagine capable of reactivating some of its sensory logics. Hyperpop, the genre with which these songs are associated, emerged in the early 2010s around the British label PC Music. Produced within a constellation of artists whose experiences were shaped by a continuous flow of images, interfaces, and digital conveniences, it was born within screens. Identities manipulated like temporary skins, voices auto-tuned to the point of collapse, compressed sonic textures: these are as much artifices as they are proofs of sincerity, allowing for the experimentation of fluid and shifting versions of the self. Too glossy, too fragile, they resemble a way of inhabiting the world that is close to contemporary adolescence, itself mediated through digital spaces.

This detour through hyperpop brings me back to the sensibility Ji‑Min’s work shares with it. By recycling the worn-out codes of pop and its subgenres, hyperpop fully embraces its status as a product of cultural capitalism, deliberately excessive. Audio saturation, assemblages of hypertrophied emotions, and irony overlap until they produce a subjectivity marked by the permanent contradiction between a desire for authenticity and an acceptance of simulacra. This sensation of simultaneity and fragmentation recalls what writer Julie Ackerman describes in her essay Hyperpop, maxicringe as “a form of derealization, the feeling of being both hyper-connected and deeply detached from reality, buried beneath layer upon layer of meaning and images.”² Intimacy as material thus becomes inseparable from its staging. Ji-Min’s work shares this same tension: a withdrawal from the world that is ambivalent because it is also expansive, even euphoric at times. The textures are as glossy as they are abrasive. Latex surfaces absorb printed images, melted into presences filtered through a saccharine chemistry and integrated into a degraded regime of circulation. Equally camp, the layers of plexiglass generate superimpositions. Each motif devours the next, replacing optical depth with a hallucinatory stacking of inner worlds, intensified by Jonathan Martin’s soundtrack. Matter is never merely a support; it operates as a medium of intensification.

The oversized wardrobe further reinforces this material excess. Customized T-shirts and hoodies hang in space, their elongated sleeves trailing along the floor, giving form to melancholic postures that seem to have slowly evaporated. They extend a sense of suspension within a cold, aqueous atmosphere, dominated by the blue Ji-Min describes as both morbid and romantic. This spectral quality recalls David Lynch’s films, when blue ceases to be a color and becomes a threshold, carrying us beyond dreams and behind the scenes, from one reality into another already fractured.

This attention to sensory space also connects Ji-Min’s work to a broader reflection on the “room.” Since the 1990s, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has created environments where “what makes a room” becomes an exhibition environment, a perceptual structure capable of producing specific affective states. In these spaces, color predominates, as Patricia Falguière writes: “When color is no longer subordinated to a frame, to the rectangle that makes a painting, it becomes temporalized; it takes on a body. Our apprehension of the world becomes entirely haptic: our sight is engaged like touch, and we perceive space through tactility.”³ In Ji‑Min’s work, blue light fictionalizes space, immersing and flooding it. The distinction between interior and exterior, world and screen, becomes inoperative. The threshold appears less narrative than structural, organizing the entire field or perception. The exhibition thus functions through contamination, producing not stable images but conditions of appearance, mnemonic residues of mental wanderings and altered experiences—much like stepping out of a dark room after several hours and finding the daylight outside suddenly unreal.