Jin Meyerson, “EVENT HORIZON” (2025), oil on canvas (all photographs Sigourney Schultz/Hyperallergic, until in any other case famous)
LOS ANGELES — On Christmas Eve 1968, astronaut William Anders captured the primary coloration {photograph} of Earth from house because the Apollo 8 spacecraft orbited the moon. The picture, now often known as “Earthrise,” reframes the planet not as a grid of countries locked in battle, however as a shared vessel — borderless, carrying us all via the void.
The {photograph}, together with Samantha Harvey’s 2023 novel Orbital, served as a supply of inspiration for Korean diasporic artist Jin Meyerson’s newest physique of labor, at the moment on view at Perrotin. The exhibition follows an orbital rhythm of its personal, starting with 4 darker work evoking sundown to nighttime, then transitioning into six luminous works that information the viewer from dawn via dawn.
As a Korean adoptee raised in rural Minnesota by a Swedish-American mom and a Jewish father, the one factor Meyerson introduced with him from the orphanage in Incheon was his love of drawing. His story echoes that of roughly 200,000 youngsters despatched overseas to the USA and Europe after the tip of the Korean Conflict in 1953, because the South Korean authorities prioritized worldwide adoption over constructing a home welfare system. The exhibition’s title, SAFE SPACE, speaks to an ongoing seek for respite amid the dislocation of hybrid id. It additionally questions the very plausibility of security itself, reminding us that even well-intentioned areas can mirror the dynamics of exclusion they purpose to dismantle.
Set up view of Jin Meyerson’s “WINDSOCK” (2025) in SAFE SPACE at Perrotin (picture courtesy the artist and Perrotin)
Every work within the present is anchored by a fluorescent orange underpainting — referencing a coloration generally used to sign misery in nautical, aviation, and searching contexts. Within the gallery’s courtyard, this motif takes bodily kind in “WINDSOCK” (2025), a site-specific set up that renders the purposeful wind indicator strikingly ineffective. Because the piece flounders backward and forward, we’re invited to see contained in the cylinder and catch a glimpse of the blue Los Angeles sky above. Enclosed within the courtyard, the work echoes requires assist gone unheard, particularly for these whose identities have been formed by rupture.
Meyerson’s work lengthen this framework via abstracted landscapes, composed from each discovered and private pictures that he digitally fragmented and reassembled utilizing AI, spinning them into unrecognizable portals of refracted mild. The ensuing works evoke a way of spatial drift, mirroring the artist’s personal confrontation with the bounds of fastened id whereas pointing to the energy derived from navigating a number of cultures and emotional worlds.
Jin Meyerson, “OVERVIEW EFFECT” (2025), oil on canvas
In the meantime, the paired digital works “SPACE SHIP 1” and “SPACE SHIP 1.2” (2025), put in on reverse sides of an adjoining wall, discover the collision of two- and three-dimensional planes. Different work, like “FERRIS WHEEL” and “OWL” (2025), provide hints of place via metropolis skylines barely seen alongside their decrease edges, although the exact areas stay elusive.
One other foundational ingredient of the exhibition is the soundscape composed by Mtendere Mandowa, higher often known as Teebs, that cloaks the house in a meditative, lush rating. Performed on a loop all through the gallery, the monitor presents a type of synesthetic translation — an try and render what the work may sound like via woven fragments reminiscent of frog ribbits and the rhythmic hum of Teebs’s laptop fan. The commingling of pure and synthetic sounds evokes other ways of marking time, echoing the work’ emotional tone.
Jin Meyerson, “SPACE SHIP 1” (left) and “SPACE SHIP 1.2” (proper) (2025), oil on canvas
After I approached the portray “EVENT HORIZON” (2025), the most important work within the present, I had the feeling of spinning via the cybersphere. The monumental work recollects the swirling visuals of an previous Home windows Media Participant, from a time and house that feels oddly acquainted but misplaced. The piece is impressed by the familial habits of historical aspen tree groves on Earth, particularly these in northern Utah and Colorado. Like mushrooms, aspens develop via an interconnected root system wherein a single offshoot can propagate a whole forest. It’s a mannequin of singularity branching into collective life that mirrors Meyerson’s personal story. Now primarily based in Seoul, within the nation from which he was as soon as despatched away, he has reworked a supposedly refracted selfhood into fertile floor. Not fairly Korean Korean, however one thing fantastically in-between, his id emerges not in isolation however in relation: a root system made seen solely via reflection in one other.
Jin Meyerson: SAFE SPACE continues at Perrotin (5040 West Pico Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles) via August 29. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
