In November, I visited Jenny Cho’s exhibition Everything Can Become Painting (2024)1 at the exhibition space (Together)(Together). The title immediately invites attention—not as a declaration, but as a proposition. Had it claimed that “everything will become painting,” it would have read as a statement of inevitability. Instead, the phrasing allows for hesitation. The notion that everything can become painting remains deliberately unresolved, suspending certainty in favor of contingency. This tonal ambiguity is not incidental; it gestures toward painting’s medium specificity, long associated with exclusivity, autonomy, and historical authority.
The exhibition centered on Cho’s ongoing series Hinged Picture System (2015–), composed of modular aluminum frames assembled into rectangular structures that recall—but do not replicate—the conventions of the painterly support. Rather than stretched canvas, painted fabric is draped over the frames, layered loosely and visibly creased, suggesting prior folding and transport. The works appear provisional, as if they could be rearranged, removed, or replaced at any moment. This impression is reinforced by the installation itself: the frames are hinged and mounted to allow rotation and movement, denying the fixity typically demanded of painting as an object.
Here, painting’s traditional claims to originality, permanence, and historical grounding falter. Cho has described these works as “objects in process,” capable of traveling, folding, and reassembling elsewhere. Painting is no longer a stable site but a mutable one, defined less by surface than by circulation and use. What emerges is not a dematerialization of painting but a reorientation of its conditions—away from mastery and toward mobility.
This emphasis on process and movement resonates with questions of identity that surface elsewhere in the exhibition. Displayed alongside the works was Cho’s self-published zine, The OBLP (Vol. 1) (2024), which interweaves reflections on painting, feminism, and personal history. In the text, Cho draws parallels between her own experiences and Celine Song’s film Past Lives (2023), while also recalling the escalation of anti-Asian violence in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. These references do not function as illustrations of the paintings but rather as a parallel inquiry: whether painting, as a form, can register the conditions of migration, displacement, and racialized vulnerability not only iconographically, but structurally.
The question is not new. As artist and art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu has argued, the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (1989), curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, marked a critical rupture in the geopolitical organization of contemporary art. By foregrounding artistic practices outside Europe and the United States, the exhibition exposed the Eurocentric assumptions underpinning canonical art history. In the decades that followed, the proliferation of international biennials in cities such as Gwangju, Istanbul, and Johannesburg created spaces where practices excluded from normative historical frameworks could gain visibility. From the late 1980s onward, art could no longer avoid questions of alterity and politics—and painting, despite repeated declarations of its exhaustion, was not exempt.
Within this lineage, All and Everything Deserves Painting operates less as a defense of painting than as a test of its elasticity. Rather than reaffirming painting’s role as a bearer of transcendence, beauty, or timelessness—values often mobilized as stabilizing foundations—Cho’s work imagines painting as a site without ground. In a political climate increasingly shaped by reactionary movements that seek to reassert origins, norms, and exclusions, such foundations are never neutral. They function to marginalize subjects who cannot—or will not—conform.
Cho’s paintings refuse this logic. Their capacity to be rotated, reconfigured, or displaced resists closure. They remain open to contingency, to accident, to revision. In doing so, they allow for the possibility that perspectives consigned to the margins might enter the frame—not as content alone, but as a redefinition of the frame itself. Painting, here, does not recover its foundation. It abandons it. And if we are lucky, everything might indeed become painting—not as a universal claim, but as a condition of ongoing openness.
1 The exhibition’s original English title is All and Everything Deserves Painting. In Korean, this phrase is commonly read—and effectively translated—as Everything Can Become Painting, a rendering that shifts emphasis from entitlement to possibility. This text adopts Everything Can Become Painting to reflect that reading. While deserves implies an ethical or declarative stance, can become foregrounds contingency and openness, aligning more closely with the exhibition’s concern with process, mobility, and non-foundational approaches to painting.