Full description from the venue
Gana Art Hannam presents a solo exhibition, “Clearview Mechanism” by Goo Gijeong (b. 1990), exploring the relationship between humans, nature, and machines. Supported by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture’s 2026 Art Creation Activity Support Program, this exhibition marks the artist’s first solo exhibition at Gana Art. Bringing together 12 works, it focuses on his ongoing exploration of digital technology and nature since group exhibition The Garden of Forking Paths in 2025. Goo Gijeong has long transformed familiar natural landscapes through technologies such as cameras, sensors, and computer graphics, and has focused more on the process of making an image than on the finished image itself.
The exhibition begins by making visible the conditions behind an image. At the entrance, The Transparent Visual Apparatus places LED boards, photographs, and rendered images within a transparent steel frame, revealing the light and apparatus required for an image to appear on screen. At the center of the exhibition, The Transparent Rendering Apparatus places a real plant alongside a digitally rendered image of the same plant, asking how a virtual image relates to the physical subject. As viewers move around the work, the boundary between the real and the image becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish.
The question of the relationship between reality and images continues through the repeated process of transformation in Layered Scenes . The artist digitally transforms photographs of nature, repeatedly enlarging and re-photographing sections of the transformed images. The resulting forms are layered and installed in diasec frames. As this process is repeated, each image becomes the material for the next, gradually moving further from the original natural landscapes and arriving at an unfamiliar scene. In this sense, the work also recalls the way countless images we encounter today are repeatedly stored, copied, and reworked, moving further and further from their original sources. Unlike Layered Scenes , which continually moves away from its origin, Layered Scenes: Window , installed by the window at the far end of the exhibition space, shows the opposite relationship. The artist photographs one of the gallery’s gardens and transforms the image into a translucent graphic sheet. Attached to a window that looks out onto another garden, the sheet brings the transformed image and a living garden together within a single field of vision. The two works reveal that an image is not simply a reproduction of reality, but a process of continual transformation that moves closer to and further from it.
Clearview Mechanism follows the ways in which a scene is constructed, exploring how the appearance we accept as reality comes to take shape. “Clearview” refers to the act of looking clearly at what lies before us, while “Mechanism” points to the conditions that make such a way of seeing possible. To see clearly, then, is also to consider how a scene has come to appear as it does. Ultimately, what Clearview Mechanism leaves unseen is the finished scene itself. What remains is only a process of continual change, and the viewer’s gaze, which continually reconsiders what is seen and how it becomes visible, serves as the final mechanism that carries this process forward.