JaeBum Joo

JaeBum Joo translates personal experience and memory into the visual language of the pixel. Seen from a distance his images resolve into a single clear picture, while up close the forms come apart and leave room for the viewer's own reading. He is drawn to the possibility that the less information a pixel carries, the more memory and story it can call up, and to the moment when an image drawn from his own life opens into a sensation anyone can lay their own experience over. Having found his artistic identity in the 8 bit graphics of the cartoons and games he grew up with, he began by making images and animation on the computer and has more recently been bringing the pixel out of the screen and into physical space. Painted with a brush onto canvas and wood, the pixel meets the materiality of painting and sculpture and carries on as a visual language of its own, no longer the smallest unit of a display but a color, a form, and a sensation in itself. Small mistakes and unexpected errors often become the starting point of new ideas in his process, and he values those moments, hoping that each imperfect pixel leads to another sense and another story. Widely regarded as a leading figure in Korean pixel art with a growing international following, he has collaborated with Google, Starbucks, Nexon, Gentle Monster, Adobe, Uniqlo, PUMA, Hypebeast, and with SM, YG, and JYP Entertainment, while continuing his own practice and its experiments without pause.