Digital Dialectics: NEWance, Light and Shadow

Long before the term “multi-persona” became popular, there was a designer who was already creating alternate identities and working through them. That figure is Cho Hong-rai, CEO of Beam Interactive and also known as media artist Paul C.. He is the founder of Vinyl Group and, for over 20 years, has carried out a wide range of digital media design projects while simultaneously building his artistic career. In 2022, he served as the general director of the main thematic exhibition at Seoul Design 2022. From October 19 to 28, he presented an exhibition at DDP under the title NEWance, Light and Shadow.

As one might expect, the title NEWance is a playful twist on the word nuance. It is a declaration of intent: to discover new subtleties through digital thinking and techniques. The subtitle Light and Shadow was derived from the theme of Seoul Design 2022: Beautiful Life. The artist interpreted beauty as something inseparable from hardship and struggle, and reimagined this duality through contrasts of brightness and darkness—a law of coexistence, like the two sides of a coin.

Having long experimented with digital hybridization between analog objects and narrative-based video techniques, Cho was uniquely positioned to realize this idea. Through this exhibition, which fuses seemingly opposite concepts within media art, Cho—or rather, Paul C.—signals the beginning of the ongoing NEWance Series, a body of work that will continue to unfold in future projects.

Writer | 박슬기

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