In Taewon Ahn’s first UK solo show at Project Native Informant, twenty-five individual works populate the exhibition space. These works can be differentiated mainly via minor alterations to the proportions of their subject: Ahn’s feline muse, Hiro. By transposing the cat from the digital realm to the physical art gallery, the artist estranges and immortalizes this figure of traditionally nine lives.

Upon first encounter, these cats, in their warped forms, reminded me of Nick Hooker’s music video for Grace Jones’s Corporate Cannibal (2008), in which — while singing of man-eating machinery and satanic employers — the pop icon’s limbs take on insect-like slenderness, and her infamous angular haircut extends far beyond the confines of her forehead. Both Jones and Ahn have taken a digitally ubiquitous image as their subject (celebrity in the former case, kittens in the latter) and used techniques of manipulation and distortion to subvert their ostensible meanings. Consequently, by transforming an internet figurehead into an art object, Ahn resists the transience that is so often the result of imagery consumed online.

Indeed, while the artist’s work might ostensibly seem to speak to McKenzie Wark’s “artwork as derivative,” which posits aesthetic value as conferred by reproduction rather than originality, their materiality complicates this reading.1 The series “Hiro 1–14” (2025) is comprised of 3D relief works built from a base of soft urethane foam and layers of acrylic paint that expand and melt into each other in an unpredictable manner. The image of Hiro — first photographed and digitally manipulated — is then airbrushed onto these undulating forms, resulting in a row of cats that seem to both repel and melt into their surface. One might imagine the boundaries of the canvas (or the screen) as a kind of container from which various Hiros — bulbous with babydoll eyes or compressed with a malicious gaze — strive to break free. Throughout, the layers of mediation that make up representation are made visible: whether through production (the manual creation of the art object), postproduction (digital manipulation), or, finally, through distribution (the art gallery).

The show’s title, “Sync,” refers to this material emphasis, which its press release argues “synchronizes” reality and representation, thereby dissolving the boundary between them. However, the contemporary relationship between image and world seems much more fraught than this. After all, as Hito Steyerl points out in her essay Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?, representation and reality are not equals. Instead, it is in the deficiencies and excesses of each that anxiety and estrangement are induced.2 The gallery space itself embodies this tension: Ahn has painted the walls with what looks like geometric gray fractures and shadowy scars. They’re an interesting, albeit simplified, embodiment of the way an image can bleed into reality (which the “white cube” gallery space has traditionally resisted).

On the far wall of the exhibition, a diptych titled Fluorescent lamp (2025) also nods to this relationship. Though initially appearing as two elongated cat faces, of which only the grain of white fur and four penetrating yellow eyes are distinguishable, these images are made up of a three-dimensional visualization of Ahn’s home, although you wouldn’t know this without reading the accompanying text. Polycam, the software used to produce this scan, cannot distinguish between flat shadows and solid objects; the result is a picture that is stretched between discernibility and abstraction, without entirely resigning itself to either categorization. It is also a very literal manifestation of imagery acting as a container within which our lives, likes, and data are immortalized.

Two sculptural works populate the center of the gallery space. Both titled Hiro is everywhere (2025), they possess surfaces of urethane, resin, and PLA, giving them a material affect somewhere between the plasticky sheen of artificial skin and the hard finality of cement. Indeed, a wall-based sculpture, titled In the box (2025), appears as a gray cement cuboid, its edges fraying to a kind of fleshy pink within which its own Hiro is held. These three-dimensional works are both cute and terrible: one possesses a swollen head emerging like a tumor from its flattened neck, the other ears that arch like a bird in flight. They are — to return to Steyerl — abject, estranged configurations of reality, produced through error and mediation. At the crux of “Sync” is the notion of the contemporary semiotic paradox: between digital and material; representation and reality; transience and permanence; animal and image. By making visible these tensions, Ahn probes the ways virtuality and internet culture have fundamentally altered how we approach images and make art.

1 McKenzie Wark, “Digital Provenance and the Artwork as Derivative,” e-flux, 2016.

2 Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?,” e-flux, 2013.

Written by Ella Slater for Flash Art