SPACE September 2025 (No. 694)
Conundrum (2025, left), Resolve (2025, right) by Bek Hyunjin ©Fondation d’entreprise Hermès / photo: Sangtae Kim
Installation view of Roomwall (2025) by Yona Lee ©Fondation d’entreprise Hermès / photo: Sangtae Kim
Starting on July 25, the Korean group exhibition ‘THE 2nd LIFE▼1’ has been taking place at Atelier Hermès, located in front of Dosan Park. The exhibition title’s use of an ordinal number for life metaphorically suggests that our lives do not move in a single direction. Instead, life encounters numerous turning pointsm often leading to second or third phases each with their unique path. The exhibition explores the plurality of life by linking new works by five artists (or teams), each of whom is unrelated to the others. This curatorial approach invites viewers to observe how each artist perceives and processes their own life, shedding light on the distinctive aspects of their personal experiences.
Yona Lee’s work is closely connected to her personal life, shaped by her experience of emigrating to New Zealand as a child and growing up without a true sense of belonging. Her distinctive stainless steel structures, inspired by objects encountered in moments of transit – including handles, stair railings, and revolving turnstiles – evoke non places that one merely passes through rather than inhabits. Her new work Roomwall (2025), featured in the exhibition, follows the same logic by segmenting space while also connecting both sides. Notably, it marks her first attempt to introduce a functioning door as a sculptural element. The artist also incorporates objects associated with rest, such as sofas, benches, and beds, to create a contrast between opposing physical and emotional experiences: passing through vs. staying, outside vs. inside. These juxtapositions ultimately suggest an ambivalence to life.
Bek Hyunjin is a multifaceted artist who moves seamlessly between music, acting, and painting. These diverse artistic outcomes are expressed through use of his physical body, and their uniqueness is shaped by his corporeal state. For his career as a painter, Bek Hyunjin’s style has consistently changed since the early 2000s; from works composed of squiggly lines, to heavily layered paintings, and later to patterned compositions resembling the façades of urban buildings. The artist plainly describes each distinctive phase as the result of different conditions in his life. His latest paintings, presented in this exhibition, appear to lack clear beginnings and endings, some even seem half-finished. However, this ambiguity can be understood as the sensuous outcome of his current physical condition at middle age, particularly the rhythm and limitations caused by shoulder pain. These works exemplify Bek Hyunjin’s uniquely embodied sensibility.
Han & Mona is a collaborative duo formed by Hanqing Ma, an ethnic minority artist from China, and Korean artist Mona Yoo. By focusing on abandoned spaces, they have presented a series of works through physical presentation or images, transforming the character of these environments. (Covered in SPACE No. 678) For them, light serves not only as a spatial component that breathes life into a place, but also as a communicative device that conveys messages. In a recent work, LISTEN, I KNOW (2025), they installed two facing lights in the courtyard. Each of them produces Morse code translations of the phrases ‘Listen’ and ‘I know’. The installation visually creates an intimate conversation between the two artists. Though the two phrases are of different lengths and thus misaligned, they resynchronise every six minutes. This rhythmic misalignment and convergence metaphorically reflect the process of friction and reconciliation between two individuals who speak different native languages.
In her cotton yarn works, Kim Bokyung recreates the acanthus motif that she discovered during her time as a foreigner in Berlin. By reinterpreting this ornamental symbol which historically associated with power and civilisation, into a soft tactile fabric, she transforms its meaning and materiality.
Park Minha’s Ghost Anatomy (2025) visualises the latent space of generative AI. In this work, the artist depicts a hypnotherapy-like process of exploring the deep unconscious of AI by assigning a 3D character named Noa to this technological other. The exhibition runs until Oct. 5.
1 The title of the exhibition is a literal translation of ‘Second Life’, the metaverse service developed by Linden Lab in 2003. While Second Life offers a spectacular alternative space projecting the desires of reality, this exhibition instead focuses on life itself.
