KICHE presents Potato, a two-person exhibition by Park Kyungbeen and Chang Yebin. The show takes its title from the meme “potato quality,” a phrase used for images so blurred or pixelated they seem barely legible. In a visual culture where resolution is often mistaken for truth, Potato lingers instead with the degraded image. Rather than correcting or clarifying what appears indistinct, Park and Chang trace these slippages, widening the gaps that precision attempts to close.

Park Kyungbeen transfers recurring images of flight from history and myth onto beeswax. Park is less concerned with restaging events than with the conditions under which they are received and believed. As the images seep into the viscous surface, losing transparency and undergoing distortion, the process itself becomes material metaphor. What claims objectivity reveals its susceptibility to interpretation and appropriation. In The Réseau on the Elephant, Park draws from the réseau marks etched onto NASA camera lenses to ensure optical precision. Intended as guarantors of accuracy, these crosshairs later surfaced within moon-landing conspiracy narratives. Recast in steel, the grid reads as fortified. However the lunar photograph it frames, already processed through generative AI before being transferred onto wax, registers as further removed from any stable origin.

Chang Yebin extracts stills from sports broadcasts and short-form video, arresting bodies mid-motion. The screenshot is often assumed to render imperceptible details legible, fixing what moves too quickly to register. In Chang’s work, that assumption falters. The aim is not to make the ‘optical unconscious’ visible. Instead, her airbrushed surfaces hold the image at the point where legibility begins to give way, testing how form erodes rather than resolves. Detached from narrative sequence, the isolated frames are given another vector of movement through the sharp dispersal of acrylic, a vector proper to painting alone. In Tender Barrier, an extreme close-up of a boxer’s eye contains the opponent’s face as a smoke-like distortion at its edge. The scene does not heighten spectacle, instead it renders seeing as an affective encounter between bodies.

Potato operates neither within a redemptive logic nor as a project of rehabilitating the ‘poor image’. Instead, it lingers with the tension that emerges when images loosen from the obligation to remain clear. When Park allows the bright smiles of the Apollo 11 astronauts to dissolve into wax (Happy Quarantine!), or when Chang leaves only a white grin suspended above a blurred anonymous portrait (Distraction #1), a strange real begins to surface. Where the image is most severely degraded, the sharpest sensation begins to sprout. This is the paradoxical moment at the center of Potato.