Sangbin IM “AI/IM”

RYAN LEE

[Image: Sangbin IM "Split, Croatia 1" (2019) Dye sublimation on aluminium. 33 x 49 in.]

This event has ended.

RYAN LEE presents AI/IM, an exhibition of new work by Sangbin IM. IM is known for his dynamic composite photographs, each meticulously composed from a combination of hundreds of IM’s own photographs and paintings. The resulting works are hyper-realistic utopian fantasies that reimagine well-known places for an increasingly technocratic future. IM’s photographic process has always relied on both the artist’s hand and digital tools, but it is the relationship between the artist and technology that is at the center of this new body of work.

As an artist constantly searching for ways to optimize his extremely labor-intensive process, IM uses Photoshop’s Photomerge function to synthesize hundreds of images into a single composition. For the artist, this task is painstaking, exhausting, and fraught with fear of failure. The computer, free of such emotional baggage, simply completes the task it is given. The work in this exhibition is the product of the partnership between artificial intelligence and human consciousness-in particular the subjective consciousness of the artist. The exhibition’s title, AI/IM, reiterates this: “AI” refers to machine learning and “IM” is both the artist’s last name and an abbreviation for “I am,” the signifier of human subjectivity in the Cartesian sense.