CURRENTLY ON VIEW
The group exhibition Para-Jagi at A-Lounge Contemporary in Seoul, South-Korea, foregrounds the unstable boundary between truth and falsehood, originality and imitation. The notion of jagi (meaning both self and other) suggests a subject formed through layers and relations rather than a singular, unified identity. The exhibition shows works that operate as originals without being original, exerting real agency despite their unstable status. Rather than erasing borders, Para-Jagi insists that they remain active: crossed repeatedly, recognised even as they are unsettled.
The group exhibition Para-Jagi at A-Lounge Contemporary in Seoul, South-Korea, foregrounds the unstable boundary between truth and falsehood, originality and imitation. The notion of jagi (meaning both self and other) suggests a subject formed through layers and relations rather than a singular, unified identity. The exhibition shows works that operate as originals without being original, exerting real agency despite their unstable status. Rather than erasing borders, Para-Jagi insists that they remain active: crossed repeatedly, recognised even as they are unsettled.
Please Take Nothing But Memory centres on a pigment migration technique, in which layers of varnish, dirt, and superficial pigment are chemically lifted from antique oil paintings and transferred onto textile. Developed in collaboration with restoration experts, this process yields faint imprints that are then mounted within various antique objects sourced from local auction houses, selected for the way they circulate within the auction house’s value system as seemingly discarded fragments of the past.
Thinking of Holland explores the artificiality of cultural memory — and questions the authenticity of Dutch national identity — by revisiting the romanticised aesthetics of 17th- and 18th-century Dutch landscape and seascape painting. The series presents synthetic scenes drawn from art-historical imagery, transposed into the traditional medium of oil painting.
Daan Couzijn; Various; 2024; Generative Adversarial Network; oil and embroidery on canvas; 35 x 45 cm
Daan Couzijn; Churches and elm trees, all wondrously planned; 2024; Generative Adversarial Network; oil and embroidery on canvas; 35 x 45 cm
In The Dutch Mountains reflects on the tension between authenticity and artifice in Dutch visual culture. It takes the Dutch flower fields, consumed by tourism and reduced to cliché, as its point of departure. The series presents AI-generated interpretations translated into oil paintings by a craftsman specialising in large-scale reproduction, creating works that are both original and derivative.
Holier Than Thou is a video installation in which a digital character performs a theatrical lament from behind a glory hole. Drawing a parallel between the glory hole and the Catholic confessional booth, the work explores the paradox of anonymous intimacy and the yearning for connection through acts of exposure and concealment. The character, an avowed atheist, appears to denounce religion while gradually revealing a longing for the very transcendence he rejects. Caught between scepticism and devotion, he articulates his faith in disbelief, confessing to a God he cannot bring himself to believe in.
Daan Couzijn; Holier Than Thou; 2021; dynamic CGI animation, rendered in 3D software. Untreated steel, opaque and engraved plexiglass
Beautiful Impact is a video work that portrays the allure and exhaustion of a self sustained by melancholy. It explores how emotional intensity can become a form of dependency, an identity continually seeking affirmation through its own fragility. The work centres on the longing for a symbolic collision, a moment of impact that might rupture this cycle and offer release. In tracing the desire for its own undoing, the work reflects on the paradox of finding comfort in one’s own collapse.
Forever Online is a 15-minute video that investigates how digital technologies shape contemporary identity. Drawing on the inexhaustibility of online content and the aesthetics of social media, the work reflects on the construction of the self within virtual spaces. It examines how ideals of visibility and self-presentation emerge from an interplay between desire, imitation, and exposure. Oscillating between fascination and unease, the work portrays a subject caught in the pursuit of an image that can outlive its maker, an avatar that remains, indefinitely, online.
Daan Couzijn; Forever Online; 2017; dynamic CGI animation, rendered in 3D software