Sometimes, the coolness feels a little too much. Outside, the air is stifling, thick with heat and humidity; yet, indoors, the atmosphere is refreshingly crisp, its sharp coolness sending a shiver down the sweat clinging to damp skin. This is not merely a bodily sensation. Beneath the coolness lies an equivalent intensity of heat, and the awareness that a different kind of pain is steadily accumulating triggers a quiet despair. Regardless of the weather and personal electricity use, this awareness remains prevalent across all facets of life. Some forms of comfort, however unintended, are often indebted to an equal measure of violence. We inhabit this innocuous violence, never truly free from its quiet force. Then, what can we do, other than remain stuck in this stagnation depression? So let us begin by acknowledging that the pain unseen by others—yet piercingly vivid to me—truly exists. We can find our path by keeping sight of the faint signals.
The exhibition Dead Spot seeks to capture those signals within the works of MinOhrichar and Kahee Jeong. A dead spot refers to an area where electromagnetic waves cannot reach, a space rarely encountered in the era of platform capitalism. In these districts, existence is easily omitted. Nothing is recorded, so the void is smoothly ignored, and those who remain in a state of 'death' are transparently trapped in the absence. Simultaneously revealing the form1 intuitively, Kahee Jeong quietly builds a resistance that anticipates subtle scratches on the clean, solid surface. In her recent work Silent Engine (2025), a solitary ‘data center’ glows in red. It is both a place where advanced technology assembles and a system that monitors the society’s tamed public. The closer one is to its core, the more deeply entangled they become. The more convenience we enjoy, the more complicit we become in the violence of algorithms, surveillance, and the physical world shaped by the technologies that make such a life possible. Near the center, the rain falls so relentlessly that even one's own hand becomes barely visible. And as the two figures move away from the center, the rain slowly fades. The life tethered to the data center has its vision narrowed by the ceaseless offerings of 'customized' design. Pushed aside and discarded, it withers into a dry, alienated existence.
In a world where “those who have lost their purpose go unnoticed and their forms slowly shift,” the discarded gather in a safe house, relying on one another’s prayers. But what are they safe from? This logic is no different from locking up vagrants in shelters under the guise of protection. Those who monitor such spaces suspect that acts of prayer, rituals yielding no measurable outcome, are the source of glitches in the data center. The persistent noise in the area may be caused by its distance from the data center or by the inevitable glitches that occur in any system. Still, once suspicion has taken hold, it rarely fades. It is hard to persuade someone who interrogates with a predetermined conclusion. The inhabitants of the safe house internalize their powerlessness, gradually losing the ability to speak in a language that could ever be understood. All they can do is remain silent, quietly wishing for absence. Those who possess physical space and recognized language can easily infiltrate the domain of the other, whose space and speech are dismissed as mere noise. Yet these others are not inherently2 silent because they have only been conditioned by violence. The artist quietly suggests that they may still find the strength to emerge and reclaim their language.
What converts the ‘possibility’ of resistance into ‘force’? How can we receive a transmission from a place where no signal can be detected? A signal that never reaches its destination floats through the world as noise. In a series of works, MinOhrichar deliberately extracts such noise, inviting what has been excluded by logics of efficiency and rationality. In The Floor of Interpretation (2024), a device developed in collaboration with programmers and instrument makers, the artist generates conceptual noise that is difficult to perceive, yet never unbearably loud or disruptive. The sound oscillates gently within a narrow tonal range, and the artist, tracing its subtle nuances, appears perfectly still. But what is visible and what is sensed are not always aligned. It is only when we begin to sense the struggle to detect subtle shifts within repetition that we become able to perceive the sender’s faint signal. The emitted noise, resonating like a silent gesture, slowly begins to take shape and condense into a tangible force.
In Rocket Sequence #9 Leave (2024), a video filled with ambient sound and crackling noise, a series of shots shows forms falling away and gradually receding into the distance. The irregular bursts of visual noise are extracted from the differences between the original footage and its duplicate, representing elements that disappear in the transition from original to copy, yet persist unseen despite their actual existence. In the pursuit of efficiently converting images into data, the noise inevitably produced in the process has been routinely erased. Whether it’s smoothing over pixelated images or canceling out unpleasant sounds, such deletions have become routine, even effortless. And perhaps, through our indifference to all that has been erased in the pursuit of a seamless life, we have played a part in shaping a world that grows ever harder to love. Another’s pain and my own may be similar, and yet exist differently in their presence. Instead of striving for precise measurements to produce smooth understanding, perhaps we might allow ourselves to feel the friction of a momentary connection and to embrace it. It may also be something we do for ourselves.
Data, its storage devices, and their modes of operation are intimately connected. Though data appears immaterial, it remains indebted to the machines that render it visible and to the physical world itself. Therefore, no matter how refined the technology, error is inevitable. We attempt to eliminate what lies outside the realm of calculation and suppress the noise that intrudes upon our seamless routines, as if perfection could offer safety. But countless errors, along with the noise we seek to erase, reveal a hidden world and expose the violence that lies beneath convenience. Rational calculation eventually meets its limits and fails, while life, without requiring a singular definition, affirms the value of the incalculable.The fact that3 suffering and violence do not yield any final result can at times induce a vague kind of melancholy, but it is by not forgetting this very fact that we move forward. Not because the violence might reach us someday, but because we already exist within pain, and because, at the very least, I cannot forget my own life.From this impossible attempt, we finally encounter4 a version of the self capable of being with others.5
1 Judith Butler, Precarious Life, trans. Yoon Jo-won (Philosophic, 2021), p. 65.
2 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, trans. Mae (Owalui Bom, 2018), p. 61.
3 Judith Butler, What World Is This?, trans. Kim Eung-san (Changbi, 2023), p. 162.
4 As Kahee Jeong states in Silent Engine: “To be forgotten is easy, but you can never forget.”
5 MinOhrichar, from the introduction to the Rocket Sequence series: “The Rocket Sequence is small talk about an impossible attempt... That kind of talk brings forth the presence of the person standing before me, brushing off the sorrowful dust that has settled in our relationship. And so, we are able to continue our impossible journey.”
