Ram Han at Whistle – Artforum International

Ram Han’s first solo exhibition in a gallery context confirms the self-reflexiveness and care which have marked her horizontal transfer from illustration to high quality artwork. A celebrated title in Korea’s leisure business—not least due to a number of latest high-profile trend and Okay-Pop collaborations—Ram Han’s oversaturated digital imagescapes push viral signifiers of cuteness and femininity to grotesque extremes: flowers bloom sensually from the mouths of starry-eyed JRPG ladies, whereas pink blow-up dolphins trip waves of bodily juices atop a floor of poisonous slime. However within the exhibition “Spawning Surroundings,” Ram Han veers deeper into abstraction by way of a morphological examine of the icons that seduce her and, in flip, us. Lurid and delightfully kinky apparitions hang-out Save our souls (all works cited 2022), whereas in I’m relieved, a lavishly bedazzled human coronary heart oozes and glows a gentle tangerine hue as yonic, floral, and phallic types appear to fornicate freely in its crevices.

Ram Han’s obsession with the physique is each intensely visceral and all the time already virtualized. In Memento Research (hatchery), a bigger tableau vivant depicting a crowded hillscape round a volcano, she skillfully embraces the true potential and (problem) of “digital portray” as a medium restricted not by canvas measurement however by layering, an artwork of doubtless infinite recomposition. The true feat of “Spawning Surroundings,” nevertheless, is the interpretation of Ram Han’s halcyon display visuality into bodily type. By printing her pictures in RGB on archival pigment paper and mounting them on lightboxes, the artist imbues them with a luminosity and a sure graininess atypical of the medium, nearly as if they’d really been painted by a hyperprecise hand. 

— Jeppe Ugelvig