TAHN · MEDIA ARTIST · SOUTH KOREA
LIVING UNIVERSE SYSTEMS

INVISIBLE SIGNALS BECOME
IRREVERSIBLE TRACES.

They accumulate.
They remember.
They do not reset.

TAHN transforms signals from bodies, places and the planet into structures that retain what has already happened. His current practice converges in Living Universe Systems — artworks whose previous states become the conditions of what comes next.

ZERO POINT OF THE CURRENT PRACTICE

PRIVATE UNIVERSE #000

First public working instance · 2026

One person. One genesis. One accumulating history.

A working field, not a recording. Drag to rotate.Enter the work →

PRIVATE UNIVERSE #000 is the first public working instance of Living Universe Systems. Earlier investigations into memory, closed artist-owned data, measurement, bodily signals and no-reset systems converge here as a single artistic proposition: an individual universe that carries the history of its encounters.

Everything before #000 converges here.
Everything after #000 begins from here.

Public web instance: manual/simulated biosignals, optional USB sensor input, browser-local memory. Material output and a persistent installation archive are in development. The current procedural renderer does not yet use the 101 drawings or custom LoRA.

HOW A UNIVERSE ACQUIRES A HISTORY

01

GENESIS

A person gives a world its beginning. A name, words and a rhythm establish its first state.

02

EVENT

Signals enter. A bodily rhythm, a simulated disturbance or a recorded planetary event can act on the field.

03

MEMORY

A recorded encounter changes the state that follows. Previous events remain legible as points, threads and ruptures.

04

NO RESET

The next event begins from what remains. This is a rule of composition; in the web work, its continuity depends on this browser’s stored history.

Enter the work →

HOW THE PRACTICE ARRIVED HERE

Different media.
One question carried forward.

These are four strands of an evolving practice. They converge in #000; they are not four versions of the same artwork.

IMEMORY / CLOSED DATA

Memory is recomposed.

MEMORY REWRITTEN
101 ORIGINAL DRAWINGS / CLOSED DATASET

An authored archive establishes the visual language and the boundary of what can be recombined.

IIFIELD / MEASUREMENT

A world is read incompletely.

101 SEAMS — LOCAL FIELD
LOCAL UNIVERSE · CALENDAR FIELD

Drawings, local signals and declared time produce different readings of the same world. No single measurement stands for the whole.

IIITRACE / NO RESET

An event leaves something behind.

QUAKE SCAR
THERMAL RESIDUE

Seismic marks accumulate on displays. Thermal traces make the vulnerability of a material record visible. Persistence and fading become artistic conditions.

IVLIVING UNIVERSE

A work carries its own history.

STRATA OF BREATH
PRIVATE UNIVERSE #000

Bodily encounters and layered time meet in the current direction: individual systems whose accumulated states shape what can happen next.

FIELD / PLACE / DECLARED TIME

Preceding live systems.

LOCAL FIELD asks how a place is read. LOCAL UNIVERSE asks what its invisible conditions leave behind. CALENDAR FIELD asks how one declared time is read by different systems. PRIVATE UNIVERSE carries the next question: can an individual world retain the events that have shaped it?

Live / accumulating Spatial field · 2026

LOCAL FIELD

WHERE IS HERE? · Site-Responsive Seam Archive

A living online archive that places 101 field drawings beside the same site as sensed through anonymous wireless conditions. Rather than reproducing the drawings, the system translates line, density, interval, empty space, and fracture into seam-like structures. Human perception and machine sensing remain as two incomplete readings of place, stitched together rather than resolved.

101 drawingsseam structurehuman × machineaccumulating archive
101 SEAMS / LOCAL FIELDdrawing ↔ sensing
seam → accumulating record

LOCAL FIELD is not a single finished image but a growing field of encounters. The work holds together the artist’s embodied reading of place and the machine’s anonymous sensing as seam, tension, and record.

Live archive online Ephemeral field · 2026

LOCAL UNIVERSE

WHAT REMAINS OF A PLACE? · Wi-Fi Field Generative Archive

A site-responsive online archive that observes anonymous 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi field conditions and translates signal count, strength, deviation, and channel structure into suns, moons, mountains, orbits, stars, and accumulating strata. It records no SSIDs and identifies neither devices nor people; what remains is the invisible condition of a place.

2.4 GHz fieldanonymous sensinggenerative systemlive archive
LOCAL UNIVERSE / 2.4 GHzsignal → structure
place → accumulating image

Unlike the moving-image works below, LOCAL UNIVERSE continues to change with the field around it. Tahnverse remains the curatorial portal; the external archive remains the work’s live operating environment.

Participatory / accumulating Temporal field · 2026

CALENDAR FIELD

WHEN IS NOW? · Participatory Temporal Archive

When a participant declares a name and a date, Western zodiac, the animal cycle, Four Pillars, the 60-cycle, and the relation to the present read the same coordinate differently. A talisman is then generated through Tahn’s structural language, and only when the participant chooses to settle it does an anonymous coordinate enter the collective archive. No single reading represents the whole person.

multiple readingsgenerated talismananonymous coordinateparticipatory archive
CALENDAR FIELD / 曆場declared date → multiple readings
talisman → anonymous accumulation

One date is read by several systems, but none is the whole. Names and original inputs do not remain in the collective archive, and no talisman image file is stored. What is preserved is not the image, but an anonymous coordinate and the rule by which the image can return.

Selected works / moving image

Below is a compact set of time-based works for jury and curatorial review: memory, tradition, public media, and signal-based image systems.

Working System | Method
Closed Dataset as Visual DNA.

Before the algorithm, there is the hand. Tahn’s 101 original drawings form an artist-owned visual corpus. A custom LoRA model carries selected relationships—density, interval, contour, fracture, grain, and temporal rhythm—into generative fields that can be reorganized by live signals. The method keeps authorship and perceptual logic traceable without reducing the work to prompt aesthetics.

The closed dataset + custom LoRA is an established method within this practice. PRIVATE UNIVERSE #000 currently uses a procedural renderer; the 101 drawings and custom LoRA are not yet connected to this web work.

01Authored source

101 hand-drawn works form the artist-owned visual corpus and its ethical boundary. The closed dataset contains no external image material.

02Structural training

A custom model learns relationships among density, interval, contour, grain, fracture, surface pressure, and spatial rhythm rather than reproducing a fixed image style.

03Live reorganization

News, sound, EEG, breath, attention, and environmental signals can reorganize the trained field, so memory behaves as a changing structure rather than a fixed image output.

Input

101 original works

Artist-owned drawings establish the visual corpus and ethical boundary.

Training

Custom LoRA

The model learns structure, density, grain, fracture, and temporal rhythm.

Output

Memory field

Live signals continuously reorganize the trained field into an evolving time-based system.

Integrated method diagram: 101 original works, closed dataset, custom LoRA, generative memory field
Closed Dataset as Visual DNA | 101 Original Drawings → Custom LoRA → Generative Memory Field | 2026
Exhibition configuration

The system adapts to the site; the method remains intact.

Selected works can be realized as single-channel moving image, multi-screen projection, sensor-responsive installation, public media façade, or research-based participatory system. A modular real-time engine, local playback, fallback states, and site-specific projection mapping allow each work to adapt to spatial and technical conditions without changing its conceptual logic.

Spatial study · not documentation

Concept & Installation Scenarios

Concept and Installation Scenarios video thumbnail

This conceptual spatial visualization is not documentation of a completed installation. It is a scenario study used to test scale, atmosphere, projection logic, visitor movement, and site-specific adaptation.

Open on YouTube
Time is not a line. It is a living structure.

I build artworks that remember. Signals from bodies, places and planetary systems become structural traces; the next event encounters what the previous one has left. My practice has developed through a closed artist-owned dataset + custom LoRA, live sensing, participatory archives and no-reset systems. These lines now converge in Living Universe Systems.

I was born into a country that had just emerged from the devastation of war. My parents’ generation fought for survival and reconstruction; my generation inherited a different war, one of identity, adaptation, and attention in an accelerated technological era.

My red-green color vision difference is not a biographical anecdote, a deficit, or a claim that I simply “see structure better.” It makes the idea of a standard observer unstable: who defines normal perception, and what becomes illegible when color is treated as universal? Structure, density, texture, interval, fracture, luminance, and spatial pressure therefore operate as parallel perceptual languages in my work.

My work brings Korean symbolic systems such as Ilwolobongdo, moon jars, folk talismans, and ritual architectures into contact with computational vision, EEG, breath, environmental signals, and generative systems. I do not use technology to decorate tradition. I use it to test how inherited forms persist, mutate, and acquire new agency under contemporary conditions.

In my installations, time is not a neutral background. It is a material. Memory is not an archive. It is a living organism. The audience is not a visitor outside the work. They become a force inside its field.

SelectedISEA 2026 · DubaiFinalistADSW Art Award · Top 3ResidencyIntermix · JAX DistrictPublic ArtTuwaiq Sculpture · RiyadhMuseumJeonnam Museum of ArtCollectionsDaegu Museum of ArtPublic MediaIncheon Airport · Seoul Road Media CanvasValidatedTextbook + MOFA Official ChannelsSelectedISEA 2026 · DubaiFinalistADSW Art Award · Top 3ResidencyIntermix · JAX DistrictPublic ArtTuwaiq Sculpture · RiyadhMuseumJeonnam Museum of ArtCollectionsDaegu Museum of ArtPublic MediaIncheon Airport · Seoul Road Media CanvasValidatedTextbook + MOFA Official Channels
Selected Recognition

International selections & institutional contexts.

2026

ISEA 2026

Selected artist, International Symposium on Electronic Art, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

2026

Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week Art Award

Finalist, Top 3. International jury; ceremony presented by the Director of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Watch event video
2026

Intermix Residency

Visual Arts Commission, Ministry of Culture, JAX District, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

2026

Tuwaiq Sculpture 2026

Official media facade screening within Riyadh Art public art context, Saudi Arabia.

2025-26

Jeonnam Museum of Art

Data and AI, Imaginary Landscapes, Fictional Narratives, three-person exhibition.

2025-26

Busan Museum of Contemporary Art

Platform exhibition, collaborative project with Pozamong.

Selected CV

Tahn (Taeyoung An)

Selected exhibitions
2026 Tuwaiq Sculpture 2026, Official Media Facade Screening, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
2025-26 Jeonnam Museum of Art, Data and AI, Imaginary Landscapes, Fictional Narratives
2025-26 Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Platform exhibition
2025 Royal Scottish Academy, 199th Open Art Exhibition, Edinburgh, UK
2025 Kinomural International New Media Art Festival, Wroclaw, Poland
2024 Visual Arts Scotland, 100th Anniversary Exhibition, UK
2023 Royal West of England Academy, 170th Anniversary Exhibition, UK
2020 The New Art Fest, Lisbon, Top 50 New Media Artists
Awards and honors
2026 ISEA 2026, Selected Artist, Dubai, UAE
2026 ADSW Art Award, Finalist, Top 3, Abu Dhabi, UAE
2026 Intermix Residency, Ministry of Culture, JAX District, Riyadh
2025 La Becque Artist Residency, Final Jury Selection, Switzerland
2025 Akademie Schloss Solitude, Shortlisted, Germany
2025 Silicon Valley International Contemporary Art Competition, Awarded Artist, USA
Collections
Daegu Museum of Art, Korea
Jeonnam Museum of Art, Korea
Pohang Museum of Art, Korea
Incheon International Airport Corporation, Korea
City Hall of Zaneccano, Italy
Central Museum of International Contemporary Art, Italy
Public art and media architecture
Incheon International Airport Terminal 1 Media Wall
Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, Gwanghwamun Plaza Media Facade
Independence Hall of Korea Media Facade Installation
Seoul Road Media Canvas, Seoul Station
Gwanghwamun Haechi Madang Media Installation
Busan Eurasia Platform Media Art Installation
Press and education
Featured in Korean middle-school art textbook: Sun, Moon, and Five Peaks
Featured on the official channels of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Korea
KBS Culture Sketch, in-depth media feature
Ph.D. Candidate, Media Contents, Chungnam National University
Interactive Multimedia Program, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Downloads

Submission materials.

PDF materials are provided for curators, juries, residency panels, commissioners, and press review.

Inquiries & Commissions

Museum · Commission · Collection · Research.

Focused inquiries are welcome from museums, biennials, public art programs, cultural foundations, universities, curators, collectors, and commissioning bodies seeking media works grounded in time, memory, attention, and place.

01 | Exhibition

Installations and screenings

Single-channel moving image, multi-screen installation, generative time-based installation, sensor-responsive environments, and live participatory archives can be configured for museums, festivals, and curated programs. Works such as CALENDAR FIELD can scale as an interactive terminal plus an archive display or projection.

02 | Public Space

Media facade commissions

Site-specific public media rituals for façades, civic screens, airports, cultural plazas, and architectural surfaces where Korean symbolic systems meet contemporary urban memory.

03 | Collection

Acquisition and artwork inquiry

Inquiries regarding editioned media works, institutional acquisition, closed-dataset generative works, provenance documentation, and long-term preservation materials.

04 | Knowledge Sharing

Talks, workshops, research

Artist talks and workshops on chronotopic media art, non-standard perception, artist-owned dataset authorship, biosignal interaction, and public media practice.

Institutional inquiry form

For site-specific commissions, acquisitions, exhibitions, public media projects, or research collaborations, please outline the institutional context and technical conditions. This form is configured for Netlify Forms after deployment; direct email remains available below.

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Direct Contact

Direct Contact

For curatorial review, commission proposals, public media projects, artwork acquisition, artist talks, and workshop invitations, please contact Tahn directly.

tahn.artist@gmail.com