Jiwon Woo

The exhibition ‘Self-salvation 21’ examines and encodes the 21st century’s altering configuration of the human practices of committing sins and seeking salvation. Human-centered industries are transforming ecosystems, rapidly developing new technologies are reinterpreting the definition of nature, and how to be human is becoming data-driven.   

In this kind of society, where we can create and design life, where we look into screens more than into the sky, and where we build inhumane artificial intelligence for humanity, how is the definition of sin changing? In whose perspective do we commit sin? What does it mean to wash one’s sin away and how do we achieve salvation? “Affusion,” “Ark,” and “I Want to Be By Myself, but Not By Myself Entirely,” and “Mental Air” together constitute the exhibition to explore such issues.

Woo portrays we, as a being in both physical and digital worlds, and as a whole single species among other visible and invisible living things through the metaphor of apples. With its numerous appearances in different myths, literature, and art forms regardless of time, geography, and culture, apple plays multiple roles in this exhibition as well. Its simultaneous symbolism of love, beauty, nurture, sin, temptation, desire, and even apology in the Korean language are examined through the visual-oriented artificial apples, man cultivated fresh apples, and invisible living organisms on the skin of fresh apples.