This audiovisual generative work begins with the gong, an instrument traditionally associated with ritual, resonance, and meditation. In this project, the gong is not only a sonic object but also a structural metaphor. It represents a constructed cosmos, a system that exists materially yet is sustained by collective belief. The gong appears both intact and fractured. Its surface vibrates through sound, while its digital extensions generate visual structures that evolve in real time. The work does not present the gong as sacred in a traditional sense. Instead, it questions how objects accumulate symbolic authority and how technological systems inherit that role. Civilized consciousness has gradually distanced itself from instinct and embodied perception. In response, humanity has developed devices to externalize memory, calculation, and decision making. These systems once functioned as tools. Today, they shape perception and organize reality itself. Within this condition, the gong becomes ambiguous. It is at once ritual object, mechanical device, and generative engine. It rotates like a dharma wheel, yet its motion is algorithmic. It resonates, yet its resonance is processed and redistributed through code. The broken gong in the title does not imply destruction alone. It suggests a fracture within the systems we rely on. The dance is not an act of rebellion but an act of navigation. To dance on the broken surface is to remain inside the system while acknowledging its instability. This work does not claim that humanity has lost its autonomy. Rather, it examines how identity is distributed across technological and symbolic structures. It proposes that evolution may lie not in rejecting these systems, but in learning to embody multiple positions within them. Within the reality we have constructed, belief and mechanism intertwine. The gong sounds. The algorithm responds. Between ritual and code, a new field of perception emerges. Sound, visuals & concept: Kunwoo Kim

Dismorphed Images is a data driven generative work composed of two interwoven layers. The first layer consists of footage of residential complexes, spaces that represent cultivated environments shaped by human intention. The second layer is an imaginary spatial structure generated from noise data. This noise originates from artifacts produced during the conversion from analog to digital, including signal distortion explained through the Nyquist theorem. The work operates within the logic of a complex system. Humanity once existed as an inseparable part of nature. Over time, through the creation of tools and technological artifacts, humans gradually redefined their position. Artifacts were initially conceived as extensions of the body, as supportive instruments. In contemporary society, however, artifacts have become the primary environment within which we live. They are no longer aids. They define reality. Residential architecture represents this transformation. It is cultivated land, structured geometry, regulated space. It is nature reorganized according to human systems. Yet these systems are themselves artifacts that structure human behavior. Humans build artifacts, and then adjust themselves to fit within the frameworks they have created. In Dismorphed Images, the footage of these cultivated environments is disrupted by digital noise structures. The visual field appears to fracture, stretch, and generate spatial distortions. Although the source footage remains identical, layered digital processes alter perception. The same image becomes unstable. The work reveals how easily visual reality can be reorganized by data. This instability is not merely aesthetic. It reflects a deeper condition within a complex system where humans, artifacts, and nature are mutually entangled. The digital distortion does not simply overlay the image. It exposes the hidden structure of mediation that already exists. Every digital image is a translation. Every translation contains error, loss, and noise. Noise here is not malfunction. It is evidence of process. It marks the boundary where analog continuity becomes digital abstraction. It reveals that what appears stable is always reconstructed. I think of this noise as a representation of the increasing levels of entropy in the medium of photography itself. Technologies to capture and anchor a moment of time into a stable image have rendered the components of the image into increasingly chaotic forms. Dismorphed Images questions the role of artifacts in contemporary existence. If artifacts have become our primary environment, then perception itself is conditioned by systems of conversion, compression, and translation. The image no longer represents reality. It becomes a site where reality is reformatted. Within this complex system, humanity is neither fully autonomous nor fully disconnected from nature. Instead, it exists in a recursive loop. Humans produce artifacts. Artifacts reshape human behavior. Cultivated nature becomes decoration within constructed systems. The distinction between origin and product dissolves. The work intentionally holds the possibility of deception. The layered images may mislead the viewer even though they originate from the same footage. What appears natural may already be encoded. What appears artificial may contain traces of the organic. Dismorphed Images does not propose a return to purity. It acknowledges that disconnection and entanglement coexist. Humanity, artifact, and nature operate within a complex system where boundaries are constantly negotiated. Noise becomes a reminder that mediation is never neutral. Distortion becomes a form of revelation. The artifact is no longer an object outside us. It is the structure within which we exist.

Cho Han examines the emotional condition of han within Korean society through the visual language of fashion photography. Han is not simply sadness. It is a collective emotional undercurrent shaped by historical rupture, invasion, and powerlessness. It carries the memory of generations who endured forces beyond individual control. It is an atmosphere rather than a singular feeling, a lingering residue that persists across time. This work approaches han not as nostalgia, but as a structure embedded within a complex system of history, geopolitics, and cultural memory. Individual bodies inherit emotional traces formed long before their own existence. The scars are not purely personal. They circulate within society and reappear in gestures, silence, posture, and expression. Fashion photography, often perceived as the most consumed and commercially driven genre of photography, becomes the chosen form. It is visually seductive, highly constructed, and culturally influential. By borrowing this format, the work creates tension between commercial surface and historical depth. The polished language of fashion carries a weight it was not designed to hold. The series was produced in an abandoned warehouse. The setting evokes decay, interruption, and suspended time. Influences from postwar Japanese expressions of grotesque nihilism, the squat movement in early 1980s Berlin, and the spiritual intensity of Butoh converge in the performance of the body. The figures appear ritualistic rather than decorative. The body becomes a site where inherited emotion surfaces: marked, exposed, and placed within a controlled photographic frame. What appears static in the image is the residue of a performative and spiritual attempt to confront generational trauma. The camera freezes what is in fact an active internal struggle. Cho Han does not seek catharsis. It acknowledges that han cannot simply be resolved. Instead, it stages an encounter. Through the aesthetic discipline of fashion photography, the work transforms suppressed collective emotion into a visible form, an attempt to reconfigure inherited pain within contemporary visual culture. In this sense, the series operates within a complex system where history, body, market imagery, and spiritual ritual intersect. The individual is not isolated. The body carries social memory. The image carries historical tension. Cho Han is not a representation of sorrow. It is a confrontation with an inherited emotional structure, rearticulated through the language of fashion.

Transcended Monk uses sound and image as a metaphor for the enlightenment of a single sentient being. In the film, the being encounters the Dharmachakra, the wheel of doctrine, not as a fixed sacred form but as a simulacrum: a personal variation of one unison voice. The simulacrum here is not a degraded copy of an original. It is difference itself, and it is precisely through this difference that the being participates in the whole. Enlightenment does not arrive as a single event. It occurs spontaneously yet repeatedly. Each encounter with the Dharma appears as the full Dharmachakra set against white noise shifted through a phaser, marking sudden flashes of realization, while an origami cosmos continuously folds, unfolds, and refolds around the being. The doctrine is not received once; it is encountered again, translated anew, and reconstructed with every cycle. The state before enlightenment is unstable and incomplete, a being subtracted from the whole. Through repetition, the being gradually adapts to the doctrine and arrives at the film’s central proposition: we are difference existing in unison. Like the ritual objects in my later work, the sacred form here is already mediated. The wheel turns, but its rotation is constructed from sound processing and digital image. Enlightenment itself becomes a question of translation: how a singular being comes to resonate within a system larger than itself.

Kunwoo Kim’s Abyss Origin project suggests a demure aesthetic and profound introspection of the ideal form of humanity in a sonic journey. Although the assistance of extensions, before we expand our territories of capabilities, we must address where they lead. Through the mesmerizing, tempting mechanism of daily products that are easily accessible, we are given to devastate our primitive demands. Subconscious momentum is perfectly manifested against erosive tendency, as a contemporary rave culture, and profoundly understanding these psychological vectors in all directions before one step forward is urgently required. “1,3” is the first Abyss Origin release after the shift from Cinematic Groovy, and stresses this desperate realization. Starting from ‘eins’, providing a grand opening with majestic rhythmical pads and beats, the album includes crystal clear rhythms in the low end with an organic, contemporary, undistinctive mantra, letting us chase, follow, and eventually lose. Finally, the album finishes with ‘fünf’, which delivers high intensity. A clear leap from the previous work, 1,3 is a materialization of wide open imaginary space, reminding the sound of our source and showing the starting point of the consideration towards humanity by Abyss Origin. Released September 5, 2023. Mastered in Morphie Records Raum by Rabih Beaini. Artwork by Kunwoo Kim with Bing Image Creator.

This project began from a simple intuition: perception is never neutral. What we call reality is shaped by belief, memory, desire and fear long before we become aware of it. In Chan Buddhism there is the idea that the outer world is inseparable from the inner mind. We do not merely observe the world, we construct it. 內心外境 means inner mind, outer landscape. The world we see reflects the structure of our own consciousness. At the time I created this work, I did not yet have the language of Jung or Flusser fully in my vocabulary, but I felt drawn to similar questions. What does a photograph actually show? Is it a record of a person, or a record of how we perceive them? Vilém Flusser writes that photography is an abstraction that appears to be reality. Even when an image looks truthful, it is already translated and shaped by the apparatus and by the person operating it. If that is the case, then every portrait contains projection. In Believing is Seeing, I wanted to make this projection visible. I used symbolic markings and ritualistic makeup not to disguise the subjects but to externalize something internal. The faces begin to resemble mythical beings, as if they belong to another world, yet their eyes remain unmistakably human. The tension between archetype and vulnerability is important to me. The markings do not erase individuality. They condense inner narrative into a visible surface. Looking back, I recognize how strongly this connects to Jungian ideas of the persona and the shadow. Through imagination and collaboration, I tried to translate the aura or psychological presence of each person into an external language. The photograph becomes a space where inner belief takes form. The viewer is also part of this process. The images do not simply ask who these people are. They ask what you see in them. The mythical quality emerges not only from the makeup but from the act of interpretation. Belief shapes sight. This work is not about fantasy. It is about the mechanics of perception. It suggests that identity is relational and constructed between subject, photographer and viewer. The outer image mirrors the inner structure. Even after time has passed, I still resonate with this core idea. Photography does not reveal reality. It reveals the way we believe in reality. 內心外境.

I Packed My Bag begins with a bag, but it ultimately reveals the structure of the world as a complex system. Ceramic forms are cast using former East German mesh shopping bags as molds; the flexible grid of the mesh becomes fossilized in clay. What was once soft becomes rigid. Some forms remain wrapped in their original mesh, so that object and support cannot be clearly separated; function dissolves, but traces remain. The object carries the memory of its previous states. These ceramics are displayed on repurposed styrofoam fishing buoys salvaged from Korean coastlines, bearing the marks of marine wear and fishing lines. East German industrial residue meets Korean maritime material; different geographies, labour histories and material trajectories intersect in a single installation. The bag is no longer a container; it is a knot within a larger network. The title refers to the memory game “I packed my bag,” in which repetition accumulates meaning; likewise, the object accumulates layers through movement and transformation, gathering residues from each system it passes through.