Contours of Zero: Emerging Korean Artists in New York
Junghae Park, Frozen Tongue, 2024, acrylic on linen (mounted on wood panel), 39.3 × 39.3 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Zero and one. For Korean millennials, 0 and 1 are not mere numerals; they are the structural syntax of a formative world. From typing commands into DOS screens to navigating early online networks that monopolized the household landline, we have arrived at a moment when the smartphone functions as an extension of the body. The boundary between screen and lived reality has collapsed; perception, relationships, cognitive habits, and worldview now unfold along a continuum governed by digital binary logic.
In the modern cultural imagination, zero has long signified nothingness, absence, and neutrality. The ZERO group of artists that emerged in postwar Düsseldorf is one example: confronting the ruins left by bombardment, they invoked zero as a declaration to begin anew. Similarly, in Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero (1953), the term denotes a politics and poetics of neutrality.
In Contours of Zero, zero is no longer a mere absence nor a term for the subordinate. As philosopher Sadie Plant suggests in Zeros and Ones (1997), zero is the matrix through which relation and generation become possible. Just as one cannot exist in isolation, zero functions not as a negation but as a necessary precondition for relation. It becomes legible only in pairing, its meaning continually shifting according to the mode of relation. In this sense, zero can also beread as the network itself—a field in which heterogeneous entities entangle, collide, or transform before they are named or fixed in place.
The eight Korean artists in this exhibition explore facets of contemporary Korean society such as education, family, and work, and visualize zero through media ranging from oil on canvas to digital landscapes on smartphone screens. Here, zero is mutable and expansive, recalibrated through temporal and relational shifts. The exhibition proposes zero not as a staticcategory but as generative—an as-yet-unnamed potential, always in rehearsal. Zero, once latent, now emerges in the immediacy of Space ZeroOne.
Exhibition booklet here
Exhibition Images
Exhibition Images
Artist Talk: New Works
Three Korean artists based in New York will discuss the process of creating new works for the inaugural exhibition.
Workshop with Kai Oh
Artist Kai Oh will lead a two-hour workshop in which participants create digital collages from photographs.
Eana Kim, "A Show Highlighting Emerging Korean Artists Probes Diasporic Tensions," Frieze