The Image Falls Apart the Closer You Get
Seoul, South Korea
Seoul, South Korea
Painting, Sculpture, Animation
Studied animation at university
SOSOSOLO EXHIBITION, Hakgojae Gallery, Seoul, 2026
Beyond The Screen, Gallery CDA, Seoul, 2025
Pixelized Adventure in Japan, Sony Park Mini, Tokyo, 2023
joojaebum.com
@joojaebum
Courtesy of the Artist (artwork images). Portrait: Photo by SeungHoon Jeong / @Hypebeastkr.
Jaebum Joo - Seoul, Pixel Painting and Sculpture
A pixel means nothing by itself. Jaebum Joo works from that smallest unit of a digital image, the single square of color that only resolves once many others sit beside it, and rebuilds it at the scale of a wall or a standing figure.
Personal experiences and memories are translated into pixels, then carried from the digital screen into painting and sculpture.
The zoom carries the whole argument. Joo studied animation at university and worked in related companies before moving into pixel art, and the habit of thinking in frames and grids seems to have stayed with him as the pixel moved from the screen into painting and sculpture. What changes is the distance at which the image agrees to hold together.
"On a screen, pixels come together to form a clear image when viewed from a distance, but as the viewer moves closer, the image dissolves into individual units, leaving room for interpretation."
Jaebum Joo
In Almost Someone, that logic becomes a body. The figure holds onto its larger image from a distance, while closer viewing brings its separate pixel-like units to the foreground.
The title carries the argument as much as the form does. The figure becomes less fixed as its individual units take over, somewhere between a person and the information from which that person is being assembled.
Resolution 50 takes the same logic into a pixelated scene. From a distance, its individual units build a larger image. Closer attention returns them to separate fields of color.
Across works such as Golden Flicker and Holding the Blue, the same question continues. Recognition depends on what the image gives you and what it leaves unresolved. Reducing an image is not a loss of information so much as an invitation for someone else's memory to fill the gap.
Material matters here. In works made on cut or assembled wood, the pixel gains a surface and texture that the screen does not have.
That friction, between a digital logic and a material that resists it and refuses to be uniform, seems to be where the work actually lives, more than in any single image it reconstructs.
Joo studied animation and worked at related companies before moving into pixel art, developing a practice he describes as that of a pixelist.
Jaebum Joo, Golden Flicker (left), Acrylic Spray Paint on Wood, 95 × 57 × 3 cm, 2026; Holding the Blue (right), Acrylic Spray on Wood, Lenticular on Reverse, 83 × 64 × 6 cm, 2026. Hakgojae Gallery, Seoul, 2026. Courtesy of the Artist.
Beyond The Screen at Gallery CDA in Seoul and group presentations that carried the work through Tokyo, Barcelona and Saint Petersburg.
His current exhibition at Hakgojae Gallery in Seoul reflects the latest body of this practice, where pixels move across painting, sculpture and installation as part of the same developing practice.
The work leaves open what resolution a memory needs before it stops being anyone's in particular.
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Jaebum Joo on Instagram
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