“HOLY” Installation view ©ARARIO GALLERY SEOULARARIO GALLERY SEOUL presents a solo exhibition, “HOLY” by NOH Sangho (b. 1986), on view through April 20. The exhibition delves into the artist’s latest works, where he crafts a unique painterly realm using low resolution images sourced from the internet.
NOH engages in the process of collecting, duplicating, and transforming images that he encounters daily within the digital virtual world of the internet, reinterpreting them into forms of art such as paintings, sculptures, and videos. NOH’s work mirrors his reflections on the consumption and creation of images under contemporary conditions. Working with the digital media environment as a core reference, NOH strives to respond simultaneously to the impacts of unfamiliar technologies. Advancing beyond the conventional method of surfing the internet for images, the series HOLY (2022-) emerged from the intuitive selection of images produced by AI, drawing them onto the canvas. The exhibition showcases works spanning various mediums, distributed across the 1st, 3rd, and 4th floors of ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL.
HOLY series is the result of actively embracing the presence of AI, a newly emerged creative entity in today’s digital imagery. The scene reconstructed with AI-generated images resembles the real world, yet is rendered more dramatically. Currently commercialized AI image generators are trained to produce outcomes that look ‘realistic’, often resulting in robust scenes akin to photographs. However, due to the imperfections of technology, they also create bizarre images that slightly deviate from the logic of the real world, such as a deer with two heads, a person with six fingers, or a giant burning snowman. Thus, one faces images that depict unreal things in a realistic manner. NOH Sangho sees the wonder and fear presented by specific scenes created by AI through the lens of myth and religious holiness. He imagines his own mediumistic identity traversing between the digital and analog worlds, calling these technologically flawed, unreal scenes ‘miracles’.
