Art in the Age of Doomscrolling 环球局势卷轴

In the age of doomscrolling, we’ve become addicted to endless feeds of incendiary headlines and thumbnails that illustrate the depressing state of the world. The overstimulation of the online realm leaves us utterly dazed, no longer knowing what’s trivial or troubling, real or fake—and no one’s immune.

Born in 1995, as part of  Gen Z—the first truly digitally native generation—South Korean artist Jang Seungkeun renders the nonsensical amalgam of the internet into paintings that dish out stinging commentary on how we consume and spread information online. To him, we’re living in a post-truth era of questionable and frenzied content designed to lure undiscriminating audiences. “In the present era, narratives collapse, and the truth is lost, dominated by thumbnail images,” he says. “My work contemplates the uncontrollable anxiety in this idling world.”

Jang’s art revolves around montages of clashing images reclaimed from the internet. It features global personalities from pop culture, history, and present-day politics, as well as other figures that take center stage in various episodes of media frenzy. His portraits, however, are never flattering; they always come with an edgy, playful twist.

In the series Source, Jang paints some famous—and some infamous—politicians from around the world, but with an added layer of silliness. Joe Biden, Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump, John Kennedy, and Joseph Goebbels appear with exaggerated features we’re all too familiar with: the big eyes and wide mouths typical of popular Instagram and Snapchat filters. “The faces of influential people whose actions affect everyone’s lives appear just like the faces of netizens when they use these filters, and the result is both hilarious and scary,” Jang says.

For this series, Jang googled the subjects he was interested in and captured the image results with the filter app on his phone. Then, he transposed the results onto canvases using oil painting. “I wanted them to look like sports cards or monster images from Yu-Gi-Oh!,“ he laughs, referring to Kazuki Takahashi’s manga series about a trading card game. Not coincidentally, like a trading game on a global scale, the people he portrays are the ones consistently involved in global conflicts and power disputes.

Interestingly, Jang reveals the source of his references in the title of each work, and he includes other elements like page titles and headings in the paintings, offering further clues to finding these images online. The viewer can easily trace his steps, apply the filter to a web search result, and get the same effect on the same faces.

In a separate series, Jang paints his larger-than-life personalities with pixelated, blurred, or glitchy faces, as if seen on low-resolution. Then, he replaces their eyes with the eyes of TV cartoons and anime characters which, in turn, appear clear, in high-resolution style. 

People in the likes of Hitchcock, Marilyn Monroe, Beethoven, Shinzo Abe, Moon Jae-in, Stalin, Queen Elizabeth II, Obama, and even Bin Laden, to name a few, are matched with the eyes of other equally renowned characters, like Garfield, SpongeBob SquarePants, Squidward Tentacles, The Powerpuff Girls, and Pink Panther. Aside from Western cartoons, Jang also incorporates eyes from Japanese anime characters, such as Yusuke Urameshi from YuYu Hakusho, Ken Washio from Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, and Shinji Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

In planning his odd compositions, he downloads images from the internet and experiments in Photoshop. He ultimately chooses the most eccentric results to paint it on canvas. “There are no criteria for choosing them,” he shrugs. “Sometimes there’s a relationship between the character’s personality and the real person, but that’s only a secondary element, for fun.” Jang cherishes the ambiguous nature of his paintings, which invites viewers to create unique narratives and imagine connections. This implicit subjectivity is the essence of his work.

Anything viral is grist to his mill. Jang likes to turn the hype of social media challenges into art. In the Assemble series, he draws inspiration from the Ice Bucket Challenge. Once more, his original references are a simple Google search away, including the first image that appears on Wikipedia when we look up the challenge (the online encyclopedia is a major source of inspiration to him), and a picture from when George W. Bush took the challenge.

Another trend that didn’t escape his brushes was the Sailor Moon Challenge, which encouraged artists to redraw the world-famous anime character in their own distinctive style. Jang’s version, Demo, features the show protagonist’s blue glaring eyes superimposed on Joe Biden’s face. This piece was also inspired by how the outcomes of American elections affect social feelings of optimism and anxiety across the world in South Korea.

Donald Trump—who has long been a source of memes, clickbait headlines, and internet virality like no one else—is a recurring character in Jang’s work. In the paintings that feature him, his mannerisms and expressions are obvious even if his face appears pixelated. The whole phenomenon concerning Trump’s magnetism on the internet and his association with internet memes fascinates Jang. “Memes help you to unite with others and express your points of view in a comic way. By saying it’s just a joke you sort of neutralize the critical view. I don’t think the relationship between the meme Pepe the frog and Donald Trump’s presidential success is a mere coincidence,” he says, alluding to the theory that the controversial frog meme might have had a favorable impact on Trump’s election.

Jang’s creative process differs slightly in Moe Soldier, a set of two paintings based on images of North Korean soldiers. To shine a light on the question of what’s real and what’s not, he experimented with a new technique: mixing digital print and oil painting. Once more, he juxtaposes anime eyes with pixelated faces. However, this time he printed the anime cuts, already pixelated, glued them to the canvases, and painted over them, leaving small sections exposed. The lines between the parts are positively blurred; only an attentive eye can distinguish between his brushstrokes and the print, even from up close.

As Jang explains, South Koreans are used to seeing caricatures of the North Korean military appearing on local media channels. “Those who threaten us flow around the web as memes and comical figures,” he says, adding that these portrayals often blur the difference between the trivial and the consequential, making it difficult to see the truth about a particular issue. Similarly, the title of the series explores the disparity between the hostile figure of a soldier and the vulnerable, candy-coated notions of moe, a subgenre of anime that explores the idea of inocent and fragile femininity.

Above all, Jang is drawn to cynical and catchy humor, which he defines as kitschy. “I think kitschy jokes symbolize a sense of defeat. They are twisted expressions of disgust for a society where it’s difficult to have healthy dreams and hopes,” he says. In Kitsch Man, he combines the faces of the supreme leaders of North Korea with female anime characters. For instance, in one piece, he juxtaposes Kim Jong-un with Bulma from Dragon Ball Z, who’s pretty, spoiled, and vain, often using her looks as an excuse for her selfish attitude. These pieces bear a sense of heightened visual confusion through evenly distributed overlaid dots, a result Jang achieved from experimenting with clipping masks in Photoshop. 

The idea stems from Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben-day dots and his use of comics to convey his message. “I like the message behind his sarcastic work and his choice of using subcultures as something with aesthetic value,” Jang says. Pop art has influenced him since his early days as an artist. He began painting the faces of pop icons still in university as an homage to Andy Warhol.

Even if Jang uses the cultural scope above as a reference, his inspiration comes primarily from his own experiences—particularly those he considers unpleasant. For instance, he forced himself to get familiarized with certain anime and Netflix shows only to have something in common to talk about with other people in his social circle. “I needed to know about these shows not to look like an out-of-date artist, but I didn’t have the time or will to watch them,” he admits. 

His solution was to get the gist of what he needed from reading Wikipedia articles and watching YouTube summary videos. He even began acting as a fake otaku, something he thought was comical, to say the least, but that also illustrated more significant issues in modern society, such as the widespread inversion of values and the lack of depth.

Likewise, Jang believes that growing up between very emotional parents influenced his development as an artist. “My parents would always start fights for silly and trivial reasons. I saw many situations where the fight began from seemingly unimportant factors—like trying to figure out what to eat in a restaurant—and then escalated to discussions about getting divorced,” he remembers.

It’s almost as if the dynamics in his family were a microcosm of the larger scenario he expresses with his work and his helplessness as a child represented our everyday confusion and torpor while facing the status quo. His blurred, pixelated characters convey an unhinged world where “the power that can change the lives of regular people no longer takes a logical form, but rather penetrates their lives in a denser and consumable format,” as he puts it.

Amazingly enough, Jang doesn’t consider his work to be political—at least not intentionally. “I tend to believe that my work is irrelevant. But, since I am often asked this question, it’s likely that I subconsciously pay attention to political tensions. Still, that’s not what I’m talking about directly,” he says, and he adds his paintings are not necessarily critical of the individuals they show. To him, their faces represent something bigger. Just like Warhol’s portraits, Jang’s characters reflect the world we live in—online and offline—and, especially when fused with the lunacy of the internet, they ooze the zeitgeist of our time.

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Contributors: Tomas Pinheiro, Lucas Tinoco
Chinese Translation: Alice Zhang
Images Courtesy of UARTSPACE and Jang Seungkeun