Archive of a post-human dawn

This mixed-media collage painting is part of my recent series Code Specimens. Developed over the past two years, the work is an installation-based artistic collage that extends my ongoing material and conceptual exploration. Working with transparent acrylic, resin, metal, and digital decals as my core materials, I continue to investigate how “painterliness” can be re-generated within a post–contemporary context. My aim is to release painterly language from the constraints of the traditional two-dimensional surface, allowing it to acquire a new ontological presence in space rather than functioning merely as an extension of image-based representation.

The work constructs a microcosmic landscape of a “post-human civilization.” The transparent acrylic structures function like specimen cases for a future archaeology, preserving traces of urban memory undergoing digital mutation. Resin’s moment of solidification becomes both a suspension of time and a metaphor for a civilization in flux—architectural geometries intersect within translucent layers, as though reality were engaged in a continuous conversation with its own digital twin. These installation-paintings abandon the pursuit of planar compositional order; instead, they generate new visual logic through spatial fragmentation.

I think of these works as coextensive bodies of the living past and the living future. The humanist order inaugurated during the Renaissance—its emphasis on rationality, proportion, and anthropocentrism—has been folded into the algorithmic and data-driven systems of today’s technological civilization. The “living past” does not vanish; it reappears as digital relics, visual algorithms, and fragmented memory embedded within the “living future.” In these transparent mediums, both temporalities dissolve into each other, forming a nonlinear structure of time in which history is no longer the end of what has been, but the raw material of what is yet to come.

Heterogeneous materials—shimmering spheres and rebar structures, metallic dust and QR codes, threads and glass granules—coexist as overlapping systems. They mimic the mechanical textures of the city while alluding to processes of natural law being re-coded. Digital decals infiltrate the surface like genetic mutations, while clouds of metallic micro-particles drift between architectural forms, collectively animating an ecosystem in which technology becomes the engine of its own evolution.

Formally, I seek to generate tension between the works’ ornamental surfaces and their deeper systemic critique. Barcodes and QR codes, once emblems of efficiency and order, have proliferated into visual noise, signifying our current condition of informational saturation. The fragmented mode of display echoes our fractured cognitive experience—where the unified narrative dissolves and meaning emerges only through continual jumps and recombinations between fragments.

My interest is not in romanticizing technology, but in tracing how materials continue to articulate their own ontological language within new systemic conditions. As material logic intermingles with data logic, as concrete and steel begin to carry the flow of information, these suspended moments become a redefinition of what it means “to exist.” At a time when the boundaries between human and machine grow increasingly porous, I hope the works evoke a renewed visual humanism—not nostalgic, nor blindly futurist, but a mode of seeking the core of human sensibility at the intersection of the living past and the living future.

In this sense, The Code Specimens is both a measured observation on the fate of civilization and a poetic experiment in how artistic language continues to generate itself.