Jaeyeol Han, Seoul (2026)

29/10/2025

A recto–verso diptych / recto (right panel): 4465582_Pigment Bar on Canvas_41x32x4cm_2025

Reading Violence: Image as Justification

I remember a boy. A fifteen-year-old boy, shot dead. Unarmed. Simply on his way home. In June 2016, in Bayt Ur al-Tahta in the West Bank, Mahmoud Rafat Badran was killed by Israeli military gunfire while returning home with friends. The military opened fire based on mere suspicion that the vehicle he was in may have been involved in a stone-throwing incident. Badran died alongside the phrase "tragic mistake."

Years later, confronted with entirely different news footage, I recalled that boy again. In late 2023, Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza's largest medical facility, was reduced to ruins by massive Israeli airstrikes. Israel claimed the hospital served as a Hamas operational headquarters, presenting underground tunnel footage and computer graphics as evidence. However, investigations by Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture revealed that more than eight pieces of visual evidence submitted by Israel constituted "fundamental interpretive errors or manipulated simulations." The hospital was a hospital. Within it were patients, nurses, and children seeking shelter.

What traverses both events is a singular fact: images grounded in misinformation functioned as instruments of justifying violence. In Badran's case, the image of "suspicion" enabled death. In Al-Shifa's case, the image of "fabricated evidence" enabled death.

Of the images we consume daily, how many are true, and how many are tools of manipulated justification? And how can we truly "read"? What images must we now look upon again, and read anew?

This painting was produced for the Reading and is currently on view at

26/10/2025

These two works form the recto faces of a recto–verso diptych.
4041932x446582_Pigment Bar on Canvas_41x32x4cm_2025

Imago: The Structure of Concealment and Revelation

When I first encountered the two canvases connected by hinges, I intuitively perceived them as sculptural. The form of the covered canvas, reminiscent of a book cover, evoked the notion of a shell. When closed, the back of the canvas—its textured, impasto surface exposed like an exterior skin—emerges as a shield. When opened, the front presents two anonymized faces confronting one another, containing relatively clearer and more explicit information on the inner surface.

The structural nucleus of this work hinges on the concept of imago. In Latin, imago carries a dual etymology: it signifies simultaneously the imago of an insect (its complete, mature form) and the death mask (the form of death). This duality—complete form and death's visage—proves apt for revealing the inherent contradiction of painting: presence and absence coexisting, the living already departed. The two hinged canvases constitute not a simple diptych but a quadriptych, wherein both front and back surfaces function as constitutive elements of the painting itself. Through this structure, I sought to expose the tension between the inner surface (visual image) and outer surface (material trace). On the canvas's reverse, I employed Pigment Bars—solid oil paint I have produced since 2016 and used as primary material in my series Passersby and Bystanders—to attempt a more primordial, sculptural approach to painting's materiality and its traces.

This painting was produced for the and is currently on view at

07/10/2025

Left Panel of Triptych / Bystanders, Three Bodies / 220 x 190cm, 3 pieces (220 x 570cm, HxW) / 2025

Bystanders, Three Bodies unfolds across three large-scale canvases, each inhabited by entangled bodies that evade stable identification. While each panel appears to contain three to four figures, the exact number remains deliberately ambiguous. The bodies are not discretely rendered but rather merge and dissolve into one another, producing a visual condition in which corporeal boundaries are porous and identity is relational rather than fixed. Limbs slip across bodies, contours overlap, and the very distinction between self and other collapses into a collective density of form.

Digital images resolve ambiguity technically. Zoom, contrast adjustment, filters make the indistinguishable distinguishable. The physical experience of Three Bodies refuses such resolution. Changing light and adjusting angles do not dispel ambiguity. This is not technical limitation but ontological condition.

The open structure of three panels formalizes this. Bodies are not fully contained within frames. Arms are severed, portions of figures disappear at canvas edges. This acknowledges the impossibility of completion.

The problem of representation is here rethought as material process. Representation is neither abandoned nor naively restored. Instead, representation itself is understood as the interaction of paint, canvas, gesture. Meaning emerges from matter's arrangement.

Yet is the maintenance of indeterminacy always productive? It may also justify the impossibility of decision—and therefore action. The ambiguity the work sustains can be liberating and paralyzing simultaneously. It renders the taking of clear positions impossible.

07/10/2025

Center Panel of Triptych / Bystanders, Three Bodies / 220 x 190cm, 3 pieces (220 x 570cm, HxW) / 2025

Bystanders, Three Bodies unfolds across three large-scale canvases, each inhabited by entangled bodies that evade stable identification. While each panel appears to contain three to four figures, the exact number remains deliberately ambiguous. The bodies are not discretely rendered but rather merge and dissolve into one another, producing a visual condition in which corporeal boundaries are porous and identity is relational rather than fixed. Limbs slip across bodies, contours overlap, and the very distinction between self and other collapses into a collective density of form.

"How many bodies are there?" The work refuses to answer this question. Counting presupposes the identification of discrete units. But units here prove unstable. Following one figure leads to its merger with another. Which torso an arm belongs to cannot be determined.

This impossibility is not technical failure. It reveals that counting requires specific conditions—sufficient distance, clear boundaries, stable forms. When these conditions go unmet, individualization, identification, and classification collapse.

The title "Bystanders" proves paradoxical. A bystander maintains distance. Yet the bodies in the work have no distance. The title questions the viewer's position. Before a work 220cm high and 5.7m wide, can the viewer remain a bystander? The work surrounds the viewer. Standing before the central panel, the flanking panels invade peripheral vision.

Moving closer reveals detail but loses the whole. Moving back gains the whole but blurs detail. No proper viewing distance exists. Every distance permits only partial vision.

The bodies in the work are intensely involved. But involved in what? Is their entanglement solidarity or the consequence of compression? The work does not distinguish, and perhaps cannot.

07/10/2025

Right Panel of Triptych / Bystanders, Three Bodies / 220 x 190cm, 3 pieces (220 x 570cm, HxW) / 2025

Bystanders, Three Bodies unfolds across three large-scale canvases, each inhabited by entangled bodies that evade stable identification. While each panel appears to contain three to four figures, the exact number remains deliberately ambiguous. The bodies are not discretely rendered but rather merge and dissolve into one another, producing a visual condition in which corporeal boundaries are porous and identity is relational rather than fixed. Limbs slip across bodies, contours overlap, and the very distinction between self and other collapses into a collective density of form.

In Three Bodies, individual bodies do not exist as autonomous units. Bodies emerge only in relation to other bodies. An arm is defined not only by the torso to which it connects but also by the other body it pushes against or embraces. A body's contour is the effect of interaction with adjacent bodies.

The premise that individuals exist first and relations form later is here inverted. Relation comes first; the individual is a temporary congealment of that relation. This constitutes the work's fundamental claim.

"Is it a woman, is it a man?" Han's question is not rhetorical. Gender is not essential property but relationally constituted. By withholding visual information that would enable gender determination, the work reveals that gender recognition depends on specific visual cues. When these cues prove insufficient or contradictory, the gender category itself ceases to function.

Yet does this indeterminacy actually disrupt gender norms? Or does it merely render them invisible? Indeterminacy may be liberating, but it also risks justifying the impossibility of determination—and therefore accountability. The work does not resolve this tension.

Han's "Bystanders" series since 2019 shifted focus from the isolated individuals of the earlier "Passersby" series to crowds. Three Bodies does not present the collective as a sum of individuals. Individuality itself appears as an effect of collective conditions.

Jaeyeol Han

29/10/2025

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