One's first encounter with Han's work permits him or her only to see simple objects: a star pattern hoodie; a read IKEA table; a stack of file folders on a desk. Yet a look at these things from a particular angle reveals their transformations into SMPTE colour bars, the Star-Spangled Banner, and a Mondrian. And the artist is kind enough to install a camera at the point of that angle so that viewers can recognise such familiar images that those irrelevant objects invent. Han's work focus on the establishment of the relationship between an object and one's vision within certain spaces: an illusion of a room half flooded with water; a silhouette of a chair by a clever use of empty spaces. The seemingly half water-filled room is the result o fone's optical illusion generated by sky blue paint applied onto the lower halves of its walls and pieces of furniture hanging from the ceiling. The chair is also in fact an illusion formulated by the black backgrounds left unshielded by the surrounding white objects. Once viewers are aware of these facts, they have no difficulty in distinguishing what is real.

Nonetheless, as one looks at the images of the views made visible only from a particular point for a while by the camera, he or she naturally tends to have doubts about the capability of vision. If this work consists not what my eye sees, then what is it that I see and what the eyes of other people see? Even these unquestionably mundane and everyday objects can be seen not as what they actually are, then, am I seeing the world as it really is? As they say that seeing is unbelieving, we believe that we understand the world by seeing it with our eyes, but do we? What do we understand?

Negatively speaking, there is no more untrustworthy witness than the eye. We are certain of what we see, yet what we see can be something totally different. Apart from the human eye, the eye of a camera is ocellar, and the manipulations and deceptions generated in seeing the world through such an ocellar, single-eye lens of the camera cannot be evaded and ignored. How often are we disappointed by the commonplace and trivial spots of the famous tourist sites which we visit having been seduced by the marvellous panoramic picturesque photographs of them? How many times are we frustrated by the shorter height and more humdrum look of a movie star than what is shown in his or her bromide picture. The works of Han can be read as telling this distorted world. In this respect, Han's 'Calibration' Series places emphatic focus on the calibration of vision through which unaltered shapes can be uncovered in deformed things. In the real world we are too accustomed to seeing rectilinear objects, and this misleads us to believe those "fake" camera images of proper shapes and apt proportions are truer than the "actual" windows and rooms that are surrealistically warped and elongated. When we see ourselves - which are another index of seeing the world - as askew on the screen on which the twisted objects are adjusted to be seen 'correct', we cannot avoid wondering what is wrong here. Besides the distortive nature of a lens, there are as many ways to disfigure an image as those to show it. As Nam June Paik, one of the pioneers of video art, pointed out, the image on the TV monitor is not a mirror or a window which reflects or shows through the actual world but a collection of scanning lines, and when put near a magnetic object, it is subject to distortion. The magnet that is put in front of an obsolete television by Han to correct the image of a table drooping like a limply blob of stretched taffy recalls aspects of contemporary history of media art as well as our unreliable vision.

As the aforementioned words of Han, we can assume the meaning of something by comparatively analysing it on the basis of what we had seen before even if that something has never been seen through our eyes. Such an assumed content can cause an unexpected and absurd misunderstanding, and in the case of a contemporary work of art, that confusion tends to be aggravated. In front of a rubbish dump placed in an art gallery, viewers cannot be confident of why it is treated as a work of art, and a ragman could be more than happy to sell a large-scale sculpture installed in a college campus to a junk dealer. Han's large-scale black and white canvas displayed in the gallery reminds one of an abstract painting, and this foils one's accurate perception of it as a noise on an analog television. We do not realise that it is not a painting but a static screen with no transmission signal until we, thinking as standing in front of a painting, see ourselves reflected on the screen. If a glace at it finds a meaningless static television screen is resemblant of an abstract painting, then is this a parody of abstract art? Yet the TV screen noise is in a sense the purest image that a television can deliver; it is not a mere meaningless signal but a result of the electromagnetic signals caused by cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the fundamental element for the formation of the Big Bang theory. Then, there may be, after all, a connection between abstract art that delves into the meanings of the world and the universe, and image noise.

If one says that there is too big of a gap in speculating the close connection between 21-inch TV screens and the phenomena of the universe whose scales cannot be measured, how about the ratio between a 46-inch monitor and a soccer field? They frequently use the analogy of the size of a soccer field rather than an abstract number in square meters, in talking about something very, very big. The reason for using the analogy of a soccer field, not of a baseball ground or a basketball court, is that the international standard dimensions for a soccer field is larger than those of other popular sports and thus it is easy to conjecture. Then again, let us grasp how big a soccer field is through the size of a television screen, which is the most familiar medium through which we see a soccer field. The size of a soccer field is of ten 46-inch.

All these come back to our astonishment at the world seen by our eyes. We meet the world through our five senses ,and yet the most powerful among them is incontestably the sense of vision. And the act of seeing is not only the physical phenomenon in which an image projected by light is reflected on the retina but a way to receive the world by interpreting the image as well. No matter how many proofs there are to verify the imperfectness of vision, we simply cannot ignore what our eyes see. AS the expression, 'seeing is believing' implies, the images around us exert almost magical powers upon us. In Han's works reside visual mysteries linked directly with the amazements and delights that we obtain at the sight of this world. Han mentioned that he pursues truth through vision, and it should be more truthfully understood as referring not to the scientific eye to measure objective facts but to the aw that a child feels and attains at the first sight of the world. In spite of the undependability and inconsistency of human senses, Han ventures to enquire into the world in reliance only upon himself and this adventure of him is reflective of our endearing efforts to search for the significance of vision in the era of images.

We are living in the world where every image can be reached through the media and thus nothing can be experienced as new, and this forces us to be suspicious of the ability and reliability of our own eyes in front of works of art by Han Kyung Woo. Again, seeing is believing, and we have no choice but to be admiringly captivated by what is in front of us that resists any explanation and description.