When we first meet other people, we go through a series of procedures to recognize the other person's face. Different people have different ways of identifying faces. We all have our own strategies for facial recognition, such as making eye contact first, recognizing the entire face, understanding the overall impression widely, or finding and remembering distinct features of someone else's face.

However, no matter how you perceive the other person, the appearance of the other person's face, that is, eyes, nose, lips, ears are an important indicator making a first impression. 'New Face' dismantles and reconstructs the facial features, the first visual element we refer to recognize other people's faces. Made by doing so, the confusing portrait puts difficulties in the viewer's cognitive process. The existing sensory method that each viewer had gonna be useless, so the viewer have to try alternative cognitive method to recognize the model's face. Eventually, the viewer experiences a completely new way of recognizing first impressions.

'New Face' is a work focused on digital editing. However, since the purpose of editing is not to anonymize the face of the model with colorful images, there are some clues to infer the original impression of the model during the editing process. If desired, the viewer can track decomposed and re-edited features and collect the original impressions of the model. However, it is also possible to accept a confusing portrait as the face of a model in itself, without doing so. I hope you can freely experiment with new ways to recognize first impressions through 'New Face'.

December 2022
Sion Lee, Student at Hongik University’s College of fine arts
Seoul, Korea