Saturday, July 19, 2025 at 5:00 PM to Friday, August 29, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Perrotin, Los Angeles
Perrotin is pleased to present SAFE SPACE by Jin Meyerson. In his debut Los Angeles exhibition, the Seoul-based artist has left terra firma. Across ten canvases and a solitary windsockesque soft sculpture, he lifts the visual language of landscape, ports it into metaverse, and returns it, somehow, to the analog world. Each a centrifugal force, the landscapes rotate free from the constraints of their genre, beyond memory and perspective. The result is what Meyerson calls a “meta-location,” something akin to the overview effect reported by astronauts. The exhibition opens up further through a sonic collaboration with Los Angeles-based producer Teebs. The luminous and eerie score—built from field recordings of river frogs, computer fans, and other ephemera—acts as an echo and extension to Meyerson’s paintings: the meeting of ancient technology, such as oil paint, and a hyper-modern existence equipped with digital and AI inputs. Exhibition text written by curator Iris Long “The Earth, seen from here, resembles paradise. It flows with color—a color full of hope. When we gaze up from that planet, we believe paradise lies elsewhere; yet here, astronauts sometimes wonder: perhaps we, who were born on Earth, have already died, and this is the afterlife.” — Samantha Harvey, Orbital When one contemplates the work of Jin Meyerson, a subtle tremor between digital media and painterly texture begins to reveal itself. His intimacy with digital imagery manifests in canvases that may originate from photographs, spatial scans, or 3D renderings—a space of “ubiquitous but delicately penetrable and sampleable information,” as Meyerson himself describes. Yet these images are translated with the chromatic tones, luminosity, and the materiality of paint. Since the late 90s, he has been captivated by the velocity and sampling methods of the digital world, experimenting with emerging technological forms and infusing them into the language of traditional painting. In this exhibition, SAFE SPACE, the polyphonic tension between media reaches its zenith, with a body of work that offers a perspective of Earth seen from space. In a moment when global affairs feel increasingly volatile and indeterminate, the “overview effect” may no longer serve as a call to planetary solidarity. Instead, it may mark the realization that the safe zone is no longer Earth—but somewhere far above it. Meyerson resonated deeply with Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, where six astronauts aboard the International Space Station orbit Earth sixteen times in a single day, experiencing an accelerated alternation of night and day. Through this velocity, they begin to re-see Earth—immense and fragile, reconstituted by the overwhelming force of human desire. If Virilio's notion of chronopolitics is about a collapse of historical time and the emergence of a new politics of time, then the accelerated time aboard the space station offers a possibility for imagining a technological environment beyond Earth. Meyerson’s own biography is a kind of planetary passage. He has lived and worked across three continents and seventeen cities, his lived experience a continual displacement across geographic, political, cultural, and psychic coordinates. For him, “constructing meaning through the structure of images” is a method of navigating these systems of space. His migrations also trace a longer postwar history, traversing in concrete terms the layered postcolonial narratives described by Ian Buruma. Meyerson was born without records, with no clear account of origin. As one among thousands of Korean adoptees, he has moved through Western and non-Western institutions, lives, and labors—a condition that has made the question of “origin” and “sequence” a persistent core of his work. Though specific series may address immediate contexts—The Resonance of Resurrection and Sanctuary reflecting on Fukushima, Age of Everyone (全民时代) engaging with Hong Kong—they are, in his personal cosmology, genealogical. They are quiet acts of return. As curator Robin Peckham describes Meyerson’s paintings, they are “like turning the telescope around to peer inward,” reeling back lost moments at the periphery of memory into the field of vision. And when this introspection expands through images to its outermost limits, Meyerson finds himself departed from the autobiographical real and suspended in the vast unknown of space. As always, he repaints screen captures onto canvas—labors that consume months. “The miracle of painting,” he notes, “is that it can contain ten thousand instants, and when you glimpse it, all those moments are released at once.” In this series, he mirrors the sixteen sunrises and sunsets seen daily in orbit, evoking a condensed, accelerated, entangled temporal experience. Earth is no longer just an image—it becomes the source of temporal elasticity, a vessel forever in spin. Unlike the hushed melancholy and nostalgia that may linger in earlier works, these paintings lean toward convergence—between the orbital gaze and events unfolding on Earth. Image-making here becomes a method of communion with all things, a posture of response amid the uncontrollable. Personal motifs remain: the orange underpaint, for example, is the same color used in flags hoisted by those lost at sea—a signal of distress, disappearance, and tracelessness. Even as the scale of the work stretches outward and the view departs from Earth’s surface, it remains tethered to a fundamental concern for human presence. In the end, Meyerson’s paintings offer more than a view from above. They suggest a view from within—a compression of inner and outer space, where the image becomes a vessel of memory, displacement, and unresolved presence. His canvases do not merely depict Earth— they breathe with it, tremble with it, and ask us to feel the fragile gravity of our place upon it. About the artist Jin Meyerson is a Korean-Diaspora artist based in Seoul whose work centers on painting at the intersection of figuration and abstraction. His practice extends into augmented reality, video, installation, and curatorial projects, often exploring themes of displacement, fractured histories, post-colonialism, and identity. An early pioneer of Frontier Optics and a key figure in the revival of figurative painting, Meyerson has been integrating analog and digital distortion with randomization software since the late 1990s, creating layered, dynamic compositions that blur boundaries between mediums and modes of perception.