Flipping Hands / AI and untitled ceramics in a drama living room

Flipping Hands is a critical inquiry into the intricate interplay between capitalism and cultural expression in Korean drama productions. Propelling its popularity internationally in recent decades, the Korean entertainment industry, which includes the phenomena K-pop and K-drama, has become one of the most powerful cultural players worldwide. First utilized as a political tool in the wake of the divided Korea, the drama genre is still known for lushly blending Western consumerist capitalism, through i.e., product placements, with the country’s deeply ingrained Confucian traditions and conservative virtues.
Spanning ceramic sculpture, video, and installation, Flipping Hands simulates a domestic living room, an integral trope to the K-drama. Still, something is broken: the pictorial motifs on the wall seem to thaw, while the pottery and furniture resembles oversized instant noodles. By using AI image generators as research tools to analyze and critically reproduce the K-drama’s data landscape, Han punctures the genre’s shiny artifice of predictable narrative structures, celebrated imagery, and familiar settings. The mesh of hidden values and influences now all surface and mix in the same cup of soup.