Sunwoo Hoon’s work takes its format from webtoons, a vertical form of comic strip originating in the Republic of Korea in the early 2000s, designed to be read on smartphones by scrolling the screen. Similar to the hand scroll painting in East Asian painterly tradition, Sunwoo’s webtoons capture South Korean cyber landscapes by mapping significant events, both historical and contemporary, into interconnected storylines. In The Flat Is Political (2017), for instance, the artist takes on an activist stance through webtoon expression. He outlines the recent feminist movements, such as the emergence of the anti-misogyny online movement Megalia, juxtaposed with waves of homophobic and sexist trolling. The webtoon portrays the internet as a deep space where polarized opinions are formed and accumulated, intensifying political debates and divisions. Flat Is the New Deep (2018) presents a webtoon that takes viewers into the flat screen and dives through the country’s mass movements from democratic struggles of the 1980s through the 2002 Men’s FIFA World Cup celebration to the recent #MeToo movement. The pixelated drawing mixed with images from webpages and news reports presents a world that flows between the virtual and the real, in which the people are rendered both as cartoonish individuals and colourful pixels. Here, the depth of the flatscreen is made up by the histories of modern mass movements, mass media, and subsequently the digital cultures and interpersonal relations they come to shape.

Works in the exhibition: Flat Is the New Deep (2018), digital picture, dimensions variable; The Flat Is Political (2017), digital picture, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist