Your Mind

Jangwoo You Solo Exhibition

September 28 - November 9, 2024

Art Centre Art Moment (Entire Hall)

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We will gradually become less happy.

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1.

The overarching emotion that flows through Jangwoo You’s solo exhibition Your Mind is "anxiety." This exhibition aims to provide clues about collective emotions that are pervasive across society yet difficult to define or visualize, delivering a message about social anxiety. By delving into the emotions hidden within the individual mind, the exhibition seeks insights into the emotions accumulated on a societal level. The chain of emotions connecting the eight works displayed in this exhibition is understood as "anxiety-fear-desire." Jangwoo You pursues happiness by layering a "get-rich discourse" over the "discourse on anxiety." In particular, he explores the desire to be happy intertwined with the desire to "get rich," an aspiration swirling within the desire for happiness. This is like a game of Jenga, a playful reflection of the reality we face in our efforts to survive in Korean society. In this game, we pile up hope while removing elements of anxiety one by one, and anyone can collapse at any time. This game raises fundamental questions about "happiness," which offers universal value and emotional stability. Where can you find the essence of happiness you seek? Standing before the happiness built atop anxiety, we doubt if what we feel now is truly happiness and rise again in search of it.

OECD analyzes happiness levels in a country by evaluating 26 indicators across seven areas: economy, independence, equity, health, social cohesion, environment, and life satisfaction. If a nation can guarantee a certain degree of happiness, then individuals belonging to that nation can be considered somewhat happy. What about our happiness index? It is hard to ignore that Korea consistently holds the highest suicide rate among OECD countries. The increase in suicide around 2000, during economic crises like the foreign exchange crisis and global financial crisis, reflects the impact of socio-economic factors beyond personal and cultural influences, highlighting the issue as a social system problem rather than an individual responsibility.¹⁾ The 2024 keyword in consumer trends is "Dopaming."²⁾ The rise of "Dopaming," a combination of "dopamine" and "farming," as the trend keyword for 2024, shows that our society is steeped in a state lacking in the emotion of happiness. It suggests a state of despondency in which people seek a sense of achievement and reward, even if it’s only through temporary stimulation, like in computer games. Over the past five years, the number of depression patients in Korea has surged at an unprecedented rate, surpassing one million in 2022. Notably, depression cases among those in their 20s rose by 90%, while those in their 30s saw a 78% increase. Anxiety disorders also increased by 86.8%.³⁾

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Why am I anxious? Where does the happiness I feel come from? The questions Jangwoo You poses to himself are structurally combined and materialized within Your Mind. Through AI programs, he shows the process of quantifying and datafying human emotions and abstract concepts that humans desire. In doing so, he visually exposes the emotions within "your mind" and asks again, "Is happiness truly ‘there’?“

The AI technology appearing in Your Mind is a tool with the potential to convert human emotions into data that can be circulated as capital. As capitalism continues to describe various facets of contemporary society, AI-capitalism likewise emerges as a concept poised to reach a new phase. Regardless of the modifier attached to capitalism, its trajectory toward profit generation is clear. Jangwoo You is interested in the influence exchanged between the individual and society as unique human emotions are separated, categorized, and converted into data through AI processing. He examines the mechanism and principles through which the delicate inner shifts in human emotions are individualized, categorized, and transformed into data.⁴⁾

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3.

At this point, it is worth noting Jangwoo You’s experiential self-discovery and how it connects with abstract concepts. His approach of examining personal emotions within the structural frameworks of socio-economics and history, as well as exploring the implications of technological advances on the intimate domains of human life, is essential to understanding his work. He has consistently attempted to connect realistic experience with abstract concepts, drawing questions and absurdities about the dynamics between the individual and society in Korean society, such as Korean-style capitalism and Korean mentalities. If we consider his interest in “capitalism - self-responsibility” now extending to “AI-capitalism - self-technology,” we might infer his focal point. The increasing generalization and loss of emotion seem to solidify the structural dilemma of a survival mode that constantly whips the individual.⁵⁾

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Footnotes

1) Gwanhu Lee, “The Uniquely Korean Suicide Rate, The Uniquely Korean Birth Rate,” Hankyoreh 21 (Issue 1505), March 25, 2024.
2) “Dopaming” is a combination of “dopamine,” a neurotransmitter known to produce positive effects such as a sense of accomplishment and reward, and “farming,” an activity in computer games that involves gathering items.
3) Hangi Suh, “The Era of 1 Million Depression Patients… The Most Common Among Women in Their 20s,” Yonhap News Agency, October 23, 2023.
4) The concept of the inseparable individual is well-explained in Gilles Deleuze's brief commentary on “individual” and “dividual.” “We no longer deal with the pair mass/individual. Individuals become “dividuals,” and masses become samples, data, markets, or “banks.” (Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” OCTOBER, 59(1992).
5) Zygmunt Bauman discusses individual and social fear throughout his book Liquid Fear, posing questions and challenges on what can be done to counteract fear.