When you closely examine You Jang-Woo ’ s work, it approaches unsettling questions.

"Is realism in art possible?"

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In his 2022 work, Your Failure is My Future, presented at the Temi Art Creation Center, Jangwoo You staged a cacophony. Multiple-channel monitors displayed mouths and faces speaking, while performers moved the monitors around. The individuals whose faces and mouths appeared on the screens also poured out a torrent of words. The artist collected language and texts on capitalism and economics from sources like Twitter, YouTube, articles, lectures, and reports, collaborating with a playwright to create a script. This was then transformed into a score by performers, reflecting their own experiences and emotions, and presented as an exhibition/performance. Familiar terms such as “Bitcoin, inflation, oil price hikes, Ukraine, sustainability, energy solutions, predictions, Mars” were scattered throughout. These countless words fill our present reality. They are words that sustain our world. However, these words, whether repeated, shouted, stammered, or drowned out by others, do not seem aimed at communication. Instead, they tumble down as clumps of noise loosely wrapped in vague meanings, becoming a score.

Here, I see reality, which these words supposedly sustain, becoming elusive as they intertwine. I witness the emptiness of the words that support our present, realizing that this dense noise will disappear the moment it leaves the exhibition space. This, in turn, reveals that reality itself has already crumbled. There is no regret in the emptiness of these words. It is simply a fact that words, heedless of ethics or truths, are inundating the world. Thoughts, imaginations, anxieties, angers, resentments, envies, and self-pity continually organize, reorganize, and propel this world forward. Jangwoo You brings this unsettling reality to the stage. This evokes the “New Realism” of German philosopher Markus Gabriel. Gabriel critiques metaphysics, which claims the world is entirely different from what we perceive, and the postmodernist constructivism that asserts humans are trapped inillusions because only what we see exists. Instead, he emphasizes that the world consists of countless individual facts intertwined—an event, those who witness it (Person A, Person B), those who do not (Person C), and the event itself. Gabriel ’ s New Realism suggests the existence of plural realities, not reduced to a single mode of being or meaning. Jangwoo You, through repetition, distortion, and passing mechanisms of emotions, desires, and hopes—whether operational or not— reveals an indecipherable reality of the world. Renewing the realism that once critiqued and sought to create fissures in the world, Jangwoo You proposes a new realism.

We should also examine Jangwoo You ’ s performative presentation methods. He employs a strategy of overlapping exhibitions and performances. While exhibitions occupy a space for a set period and allow relatively free entry and exit, performances specify time and place, actively involving the audience. The audience's presence becomes a key element for the work to function, unlike exhibitions where works, including videos, remain effective even in their absence. Moreover, there are “bodies.” Jangwoo You ’ s overlapping strategy makes his works impossible to define purely as exhibitions or performances. On the foundation of the exhibition, performance events arise.

In his 2020 exhibition Distinguishable, Indistinguishable at Post Territory Ujeongguk, the central piece, Protocol of Concentration, featured performers repeatedly enacting habits and actions to achieve “concentration” in a theatrical-like setting. The filmed videos were projected onto five screens equipped with sensors that caused them to vibrate. Rather than shaking the data of the videos, the screens supporting the videos were physically moved. This approach reveals the artist ’ s ingenuity, as the vibrations extend the work into a physically resonant space rather than merely presenting trembling visuals. Viewers, while watching the work, also experience bodily reactions—blinking, dizziness—making the space genuinely interactive.

Another piece, No Future: A Song That Must Be Real Yet Abstract, used as background music for Your Failure is My Future, is a composition based on the VIX index, often referred to as the "fear index" of stock market volatility. Data from specific periods dictated the crescendos and dynamics, creating a fragmented song where sounds like “Ah” or “Ha” reflected weekly dynamics. This fragmented composition overlapped with the chaotic language of Your Failure is My Future,functioning as a chorus that was “real yet abstract.”

The question posed at the beginning—“Is realism in art possible?”—remains unsettling. In a world more grimly realistic than art itself, a despairing follow-up question emerges: “Do we even need realism in art?” Yet, this new realism, encountered outside the screen and in tangible (exhibition) spaces, may create new “resonances.”