Sofia, in your practice, digital imagery appears to operate less as a neutral technological tool and more as a conceptual field in which history, geography, and emotional memory converge. Considering your recurring interest in maps, labyrinths, and cultural traces, could you elaborate on how the digital surface becomes a kind of epistemological space, one in which visual fragments of nature, marble, and historical reference are reorganized into a new visual language that both reflects and questions the structures through which we navigate identity, territory, and collective memory?
Working with digital imagery has been part of my life for more than thirty years, first as a student, then as a graphic designer and later as an artist. For me, the digital medium has never been merely a technological tool; it is closer to a space of stratification, a living archive where fragments of experience, memory, and research can coexist and take form.

MiJung Yun, your drawings appear to construct time not as a linear progression but as a density of marks, a field of accumulated gestures. Could you speak about how your artistic journey led you toward this temporal conception of image-making, and how the act of drawing itself became a way of thinking rather than merely representing?
I often lost track of time when I am drawing. When a particular visual image first appears, I feel compelled to stay with it until I fully move and accumulate across the surface over time. The density of marks I build is not immediately visible from a distance; it asks viewers to come closer, to slow down, and to spend time with the work. Through this, I hope viewers can sense the duration, the movement, and complex idea embedded within that space.

Your life suggests an insistence on curiosity as a lifelong methodology, an openness that traverses law, engineering, music, pedagogy, and visual art. In an era that often demands specialization, might this multidisciplinary path be understood as a form of quiet resistance? What would it mean for contemporary art to reclaim a model of the artist not as an isolated genius, but as a civic participant, educator, and orchestrator of communal imagination?
My life may appear as a trajectory of curiosity, but for me this curiosity is not a method or a strategy. It arises from a necessity to understand.
That search has led me through different fields — education, art, music, engineering, but also medicine, psychology, and forms of alternative practice such as those I encountered in Tai Chi. These are not separate interests, but connected ways of engaging with the complexity of life.

The term you have coined, “Energy Abstract,” resists conventional formalist description, yet it simultaneously asserts a proprietary authorship and a structured philosophy. In the history of abstraction, from the spiritual aspirations of early modernism to the dematerialization of the art object in conceptual practices, abstraction has often carried utopian ambitions. How does your articulation of energy abstraction position itself in relation to this lineage, particularly in its insistence on measurable vibration and psychological transformation rather than purely optical experience?
I graduated as a psychologist, and I have spent around 15 years in the art world as an artist, almost 20 years of experience in total. What I can say, that psychological factors are always present in our lives, every day and every minute. And color is a language that artists use in painting. It is one of the most direct ways to express ideas and tell a story.

If we consider your paintings as sites where reality, memory, and art history are continuously eroded and recomposed, what kind of viewer do you imagine encountering them: an observer, an archaeologist, or perhaps a participant in the very process of sedimentation that the work enacts?
An observer who takes the time to look, to contemplate, and to let the mental landscape that my works represent sink in. Everyone, with their own perspective, knowledge, interests and background, will experience my works from a different angle. The longer you look, the more the artwork reveals to you.

David, how do you understand the act of stitching as a temporal structure within your practice, where each thread becomes not merely a material gesture but a unit of lived time, and how does this slow, accumulative process challenge the accelerated visual culture of contemporary image production?
For me, each stitch represents a moment in time. When I work, I’m not thinking in hours—I’m thinking in presence. The piece grows slowly, one thread at a time, and that pace stands in contrast to how quickly images are created and consumed today. My work asks both me and the viewer to slow down and stay with something longer.

Your surfaces often hold light in a way that feels almost geological, as though the figure were weathered by time rather than modeled in studio; how conscious are you of light as an active collaborator, and do you conceive of shadow not simply as absence but as a structural counterform that completes the ethical and emotional architecture of the piece?
Light energizes my interpretations in clay as a collaborator to my textures and marks. Years of hiking in mountain landscapes, including my ancestors’ Adirondack homestead, informs my sculptural vocabulary. That scenery is not just a seemingly stationary mountain or range, but activated by the light and shadows moving across it.

Your figures seem to hover within an ambiguous ground. How do you conceive of gravity within your pictorial universe?
The hovering bodies reflect instability. They are neither fully grounded nor entirely transcendent. This ambiguity reflects contemporary uncertainty while also suggesting spiritual suspension.

Dany, your collages seem to operate in what might be called a field of suspended temporality, where fragments resist narrative closure while remaining emotionally charged. How do you think about time in your work, not simply as memory or nostalgia, but as a material condition that structures the image from within?
It is true that collage inherently plays with a mixture of different times. This is due to the fact that printed materials usually serve a specific purpose and are mostly tied to contemporaneity - they often have an expiration date. Naturally, the same conditons apply to my collages. However, what may differ is my interest in the fragments I choose to use. What fascinates me about printed matter - and about visual material in general - is color, structure, pattern, light, and shadow.

The presence of strong, luminous skies and radiant landscapes suggests a persistent fascination with light as both atmosphere and symbol. What role does light play in structuring the emotional or conceptual space of your paintings?
It's true, in my works there is always a segment of sky animated by intense and lively clouds or by lights that tear through the skies. They always give me hope and complement my enveloping and immersive landscapes leaving glimmers of confidence in the future. I have always been fascinated by the majesty of the lowland skies, immense and without borders, like those I saw as a child and which enchanted my heart.

Abstraction has often been framed as transcendental or purely formal. Where do you situate your work?
My work does not seek transcendence away from life, nor does it pursue formal reduction. It is grounded in lived experience, emotional endurance, and resilience. Abstraction becomes a language capable of holding complexity without depiction.

The materiality of your work, corrugated cardboard, rust, bitumen, packing paper, pigment, acrylic, charcoal, operates not as supplement but as ontology. What draws you to these unconventional materials, and how do they function as carriers of memory, entropy, or resistance within the pictorial field?
Natural materials have always fascinated me. They inspire the viewer to engage with the work. Often they are not merely additions but play an essential role, sometimes as carriers of resistance—how does a material fit into my idea, how does it respond to my brushstroke and application of color? I often accept the stubbornness of a material, and precisely that creates profound tension

You have described your aim as blurring the boundaries between digital and traditional media. Do you perceive this blurring as a synthesis, a productive friction, or an unresolved tension that must remain visible in the finished piece?
I lean toward unresolved tension. I believe it’s important for some 'seams' to remain visible. By keeping that tension unresolved, the work reflects something imperfect. It draws the viewer in to examine the ‘why?’ Leaving the process visible allows the viewer to question the authenticity and origin of the marks they see as original and not manufactured.

In your reflections on form, you describe harmony as the integration of multiple forms into an overarching unity; how do you approach composition so that this unity emerges organically, rather than appearing as a predetermined symbolic scheme imposed upon the canvas?
In nature, many forms are present in a single creation and are harmoniously connected. Therein lies my observation about the democratic use of forms. Harmony arises through adaptation and a certain tolerance.

The idea of transformation appears as a central metaphor throughout your work. How do you conceptualize transformation not merely as a visual effect, but as a philosophical principle, and how does this idea relate to broader questions of perception, reality, and possibility?

A transformation initially implies a technical conversion. This photographic artwork, created through this conversion, is no longer a mere depiction of a fleeting moment of perception, but rather a sensory representation of a possibility inherent in the photographic material, thus allowing for a new and different perspective on photographic reproduction.The symbolic meaning shows a not-yet, something that is potentially existing within the sensually actual.

Howard, in the works gathered in ICON, one encounters an insistence on the image as an unstable perceptual event rather than a fixed representation. Could you speak about how your layered constructions challenge the classical photographic index, and whether you see Techspressionism as a critique of the camera’s historical claim to objectivity?
When I speak of layered constructions, I mean images built from a photographed base that are then deliberately overlaid, remapped, or physically altered. The altered image enables a single fixed moment to present as an ongoing perceptual event. These procedures make visible the gap between a camera’s raw capture and the full, lived experience of seeing: memory, affect, display conditions, and allow individual perceptions to become part of the picture rather than the picture being just in the viewing background.

Vian, your paintings declare themselves as visual poems, which suggests not illustration but a transfer of poetic logic into pigment. What, for you, is the equivalent of syntax in painting: the cut, the line break, the enjambment, the caesura, the moment where meaning does not resolve but deepens through suspension?

Beautiful question. As a visual artist and an award-winning poet, I have always wanted my work to carry a lyrical flow and be presented to the world much like a poem: suggestive, mysterious, yet rich with substance and meaning. The syntax in my painting is not found in literal commas, pauses, or grammatical shifts, but rather through imagery, composition, balance, movement, and, of course, color theory.