2026 ACK ack ack ack: Artist-Critic Matching Program
When the Objects of This World Become the Narratives of Another World
이 세계의 사물이 이세계의 서사가 될 때: 박천
Original text by Cheon Park
Read the original text
번역: 김미혜
Translated by Mihye Kim
1.
Tens of millions of years ago, a single mosquito fell into the sap of a tree and died. The sap hardened into amber, preserving the mosquito inside for tens of millions of years. The idea that an already vanished world could be entirely reconstructed from a single drop of blood left in the mosquito’s belly became a story. We loved that story. It was an absurd fantasy, yet perhaps all the more fascinating because of its absurdity. But for that fantasy to be possible, one crucial premise must hold: the fragment must contain the whole. A single bone must be enough to infer the way its owner walked. A cross-section of rock strata must reveal the climate of millions of years ago. The chemical composition of a single pebble must allow us to trace where it came from.
However, this method has one blind spot. The world reconstructed from a fragment inevitably depends on the imagination of the present moment in which that fragment is discovered. I still remember how startling it was to watch a YouTube video claiming that chickens are the descendants of dinosaurs. I am not sure whether it was because I was eating a descendant of the most colossal and awe-inspiring creatures ever to walk the Earth, or because I simply did not want to believe the hypothesis that those creatures had feathers. In any case, no one can prove what the world of tens of millions of years ago was actually like. The majesty we see inscribed in a fossil may itself be something projected onto it by the imagination of the person who unearthed its bones. What we call reconstruction is, in fact, not the past itself, but a narrative composed in the language of the present by the person who happens to hold that fragment in their hands. The same is true of memory. Contrary to the assumption that memory faithfully reproduces the past, each moment of recollection recreates it within the conditions of that present. The past is never replayed. What is replayed is a past reconstructed by the present.
Lee Su-hyeon’s practice begins with such fragments. The artist collects remnants left behind in the processes of urban formation and disappearance—jujubes from an abandoned house, the familiar strangeness of new towns, slag buried in apartment parks, and so on. These objects can be understood as fragments of the time each place has lived through. However, what the artist does is not to reconstruct the past on the basis of these fragments. Nor is it to reveal what these places were like in earlier times. Starting from the experience of encountering these objects, Lee Su-hyeon instead creates landscapes that do not yet exist. And yet these fragments are each situated on different temporal planes.
2.
In places, time accumulates like a soft layer of snow. In spaces built at that time, someone from that time must have lived, and upon that time, something new is built again. A city repeats this process, endlessly covering over earlier times. Yet even as new buildings rise, new roads are laid, and new parks are created, what came before does not disappear—it merely becomes invisible. And yet, the city continuously performs this “newness” precisely in order to sustain that invisibility.
Contemporary art practices dealing with place often arrive at an attempt to uncover these buried layers of time once again. It seems that moving into residencies, conducting research, recording what has disappeared, and transferring it into exhibition spaces has solidified into a kind of routine convention. Meanwhile, within the concept of site-specific practice, there are two distinct lineages. These are notions of site-specificity represented respectively by Richard Serra and Kwon Miwon. In Serra’s conception of site-specificity, a work is bound to a particular physical coordinate; the moment it is relocated, it loses its force as art. By contrast, Kwon Miwon expands this notion of the coordinate into discourse, redefining the “site” as something that can also encompass social, political, and institutional conditions. Either as attachment or as expansion, most site-related practices are situated somewhere between these two lineages.
3.
Lee Su-hyeon’s first site was an abandoned house—one left vacant through a decade of repeatedly revised redevelopment plans. While walking around the Jangwi-dong area, the artist happened to meet the elderly person who had been the house’s last resident, and through this encounter began collecting the memory of the place. The jujube tree encountered together with the former resident upon entering the empty house was a particularly significant object. In recalling how a tree transplanted during a move in 1989 still stood in the yard, the artist brought back jujubes, laid them out to dry on a bamboo mat, and boiled jujube tea every day to share with visitors. In response to the former resident’s wistful remark that the flowerbed once tended in the front yard no longer existed, the artist filled an unused jade-colored bathtub—no longer connected to running water—with soil and made flowers bloom in it. The dog Bok-sil, who once guarded the house, is also no longer there; yet a sensor was installed under the entrance so that a barking sound plays whenever someone stands at the door. Within the empty house, actions embedded in the resident’s memories were set in motion once again: drying jujubes, boiling tea, tending flowers, barking at the door. Memory remained not as image but as action, and the artist replayed the time of the empty house onto the present by reactivating those actions.
![[translation] 이 세계의 사물이 이세계의 서사가 될 때 복제](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/05a00ffb00918.jpeg)
대추 말리기, 2021, 대추, 대나무발, 공간설치
![[translation] 이 세계의 사물이 이세계의 서사가 될 때 복제](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/7837d9f8e6ead.jpeg)
앞마당 화단, 2021, 화초, 공간설치
Practices that engage with the memory of place often tend to adopt the form of a conventional archive. Such archives preserve the past and summon it up again. Yet it is not easy for that past to truly meet the time of the present. The reason Lee Su-hyeon chose to revive the roles of objects was likely not only to record the past, but also to make it function again within the space of the present. This approach can be understood as belonging to the position of site-specificity described by Kwon Miwon, in that it involves staying in a place for an extended period, collecting people’s stories, and reconstructing space on the basis of those narratives.
![[translation] 이 세계의 사물이 이세계의 서사가 될 때 복제](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/8c99c996c2ed5.jpeg)
![[translation] 이 세계의 사물이 이세계의 서사가 될 때 복제](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/32644c9eee7f2.jpeg)
비로소 마주하다,_전시 전경
4.
For a young artist, such a theoretical background likely operated as an unavoidable framework. It may even be assumed that responding to the social context embedded in a place is the natural mode of site-specific practice. Yet not every place allows for this kind of temporality. Some cities are designed, from the outset, to have no prior time of their own. The city of Goyang is a first-generation new town. Between grid-like residential blocks, apartment complexes and schools are fitted together like pieces of a puzzle, while lakes and parks are distributed in between. It is peaceful. Yet this very peacefulness feels strange. Trees stand where trees are meant to stand, and water lies where water is meant to lie—but everything is too precise. One day, while sitting on a swing in a park, Lee Su-hyeon was approached by a stranger who asked where he should go to find a commercial district, saying he had been walking endlessly without reaching one. In fact, the commercial area was in the very next block; the man’s movement had followed a route designed for strolling. The more perfect the design, the more invisible it becomes. In the theme park built with dinosaurs reconstructed from the blood of a mosquito trapped in amber, the dinosaurs appear alive yet exist only as life within a design. Likewise, the landscape is meant to be something that naturally is on its own, yet it is in fact controlled. This paradox—where perfect reconstruction exposes its own artificiality—strangely overlaps with the planned nature of Goyang.
In the abandoned house in Jangwi-dong, jujubes, a bathtub, and the sound of a barking dog were left behind. The place itself yielded objects. But in Goyang, there were no such objects. In a city where earlier time is not visible at all, there are no fragments that connect past and present. The most accessible carrier of the city’s time was Lee Su-hyeon herself, someone who had been born and raised there. As the artist herself was already functioning as an object that testifies to the city’s time, she had to choose materials in order to translate this condition into images. And so Lee Su-hyeon chose salt. It was an attempt to translate the unstable temporality felt in a rapidly changing new town into the properties of salt—something that shifts, seeps, and crystallizes on its own. Like a Japanese dry landscape garden that recreates nature using only stone and sand, without water, she reconstructed the night waves of Ilsan Lake Park into a landscape using salt and calligraphy ink, and translated the topography of Goyang into a nocturnal landscape veiled in mist.
![[translation] 이 세계의 사물이 이세계의 서사가 될 때 복제](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/f184f9af5d2b8.jpeg)
흩어지는 달빛_전시전경
![[translation] 이 세계의 사물이 이세계의 서사가 될 때 복제](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/1edccc09e5c4a.jpeg)
흩어지는달빛, 2024, 소금에 먹, 암염, 포맥스, 가변설치
Visually, it was convincing. But site-specific art always raises questions of source and justification. Lee Su-hyeon was no exception. Questions arose: why salt was chosen, what relation salt bears to Goyang, and in what context the two might be connected. These questions may also be seen as extending from the trajectory of site-specific practice that began in Jangwi-dong. Nevertheless, Lee Su-hyeon brought salt into the work. It was not because the artist has a particularly salty diet, nor because she has any connection to the sea. Nevertheless, she used salt. It can be read as a declaration that salt—or more broadly, objects—do not necessarily have to be bound to specific places. Bringing a material associated with the sea into a city without the sea does not represent a failure of reference between object and place. Rather, it calls into question the very assumption that only objects tied to a place can speak of that place.
5.
She sought to put that doubt to the test in the city of Ulsan. It was an attempt to continue her exploration of salt's materiality. And, coincidentally, the residency she joined was called “Sogeumnaru” which means “Salt Wharf”. Yeompo-dong—whose name literally means “Salt Port”—is a neighborhood in Ulsan’s Buk-gu (Northern District). This area is said to have once been a port where salt was transported. It may even seem as if salt had been waiting for the artist. Yet, unfortunately, Lee Su-hyeon’s salt was not the salt of this neighborhood. Her salt was saturated with the unstable temporality of the new town; it did not contain the history of Yeompo-dong. It was the same material, but one that held a different narrative. Moreover, the industrial landscape of Ulsan that she encountered was far removed from salt. The city offered abundant stories, from individual lives to industrial history, yet salt could not find its place within any of them. It was not that the object rejected the place; rather, it was the place that did not accept the object.
![[translation] 이 세계의 사물이 이세계의 서사가 될 때 복제](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/272aa385983fd.jpeg)
붉은 착륙지, 2025, 싱글채널비디오, 4K, 2분
붉은 착륙지, 2025, 울산 쇠부리복원사업에서 발생한 슬래그, 토철, 가변설치
It was iron that Lee Su-hyeon discovered through her continued investigation of objects and places. Ulsan still retains the memory of its early iron industry in Dalcheon Iron Mine. At the Urban Regeneration Center, the artist learned of a festival held as part of the Soeburi Restoration Project—soeburi being an old Korean word for iron-making. The iron restoration festival in the city of iron—she likely expected traces of ancient smelting or a site steeped in solemnity. But when she arrived, the park within a residential apartment complex felt much more like a friendly neighborhood festival. It was amid this sense of dissonance—Is this really a festival about iron?—that she encountered a black mass pulled from the furnace. It was slag. What first came to the artist's mind was neither the history of Dalcheon Iron Mine nor the industrial history that had sustained Ulsan. Rather, it looked as though it had suddenly fallen from the sky. Fused into a single hard mass of tangled charcoal, ash, seashells, and iron particles, the lump appeared less like something that belonged to this earth than like something that had flown in from somewhere distant and lodged itself there. Before she could grasp the narrative of the place, it was the estrangement of the object itself that came first.
![[translation] 이 세계의 사물이 이세계의 서사가 될 때 복제](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/a6d61fcea7353.jpeg)
![[translation] 이 세계의 사물이 이세계의 서사가 될 때 복제](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/f5eda942239be.jpeg)
중력관찰1 탐사코드 D-SL-16, 2025, 슬래그, 스테인레스스틸, 자기부상장치, 135×70×85cm
중력관찰2 정지된 궤도, 2025, 슬래그, 스테인레스스틸, 40×50×80cm
Yet this sense of estrangement was not new. The artist knew she had experienced it before. It was only before the slag that her earlier experiences of those places came sharply into focus: places where the city had been overlaid with newness, where nature—something that should not have been there, yet somehow had to be—had been inserted, and where an indefinable sense of estrangement lingered beneath the orderly grid. The reason the anonymous lump in the apartment park captivated Lee Su-hyeon was that it embodied this estrangement in its most dramatic form.
6.
How, then, can this sense of estrangement be translated into artistic practice? As the artist readily admits, calling slag a meteorite may seem like a childish idea. Yet there is an intriguing background to this childishness: remarkably, the rust-red ground of the Dalcheon Iron Mine, covered in iron oxide, resembles the surface of Mars. The same iron oxide has produced the same color across entirely different times and spaces. In an age when Elon Musk's visions captivate so many people, this reveals just how fragile any attempt to anchor a place—or rather, the narrative of a place—to fixed coordinates can be. The fact that most of the dinosaurs appearing in Jurassic World are actually species from the Cretaceous period may likewise suggest that, in this world, there is always an inevitable gap between what a name points to and what reality actually is. Rather than trying to correct this gap, Lee Su-hyeon amplifies it. Transforming slag into meteorites, Dalcheon into a landing site, and field collection records into an expedition log is not an attempt to recount the history of a place. Instead, it is an effort to translate the sense of estrangement experienced in confronting these objects here and now into the language of another world.
In Serra's conception of site-specificity, an object dies the moment it is removed from its designated coordinates. In Kwon Miwon's account of site-specificity, the site itself escapes its physical coordinates and becomes discourse. Lee Su-hyeon's objects, however, belong to neither category. Even after leaving Ulsan and being placed in an exhibition space in another city, the slag does not die. On the contrary, it is precisely by leaving its original site that the sense of estrangement the artist experienced before the object finally comes into view. What had been merely a stone while buried in an Ulsan’s park begins, the moment it is placed on different coordinates, to appear as estrangement itself. The same is true of the salt. Just as the salt from Goyang carried a different narrative from the salt of Yeompo-dong, an object can speak of the time of a place without belonging to that place. Indeed, it is precisely because it is no longer bound to that place that it is able to speak.
Iron oxide gradually turns red again over time, and salt changes its form in response to humidity. Slag, too, takes on a different hue from one day to the next depending on the humidity conditions in the exhibition space. These objects are not complete. They are still changing. No object is ever truly still. It is only because the pace of their transformation is so slow that we mistake them for something fixed. Perhaps this is why Lee Su-hyeon's practice begins not with controlling materiality, but with observing it.
![[translation] 이 세계의 사물이 이세계의 서사가 될 때 복제](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/5028473bcca61.jpeg)
붉은 착륙지_전시전경1 착륙지 현장
7.
What, then, has Lee Su-hyeon been grappling with all this time? Perhaps she is an artist who collects the stories of places without being particularly interested in conveying those stories as they are. In Jangwi-dong, she approached them through personal narrative; in Goyang, through materiality; and in Ulsan, through the fiction of a science-fictional other world. Across these three solo exhibitions, she has developed three distinct methods. Looking back, however, what she has consistently pursued is not the place itself, but the forms through which a place can be conveyed. In other words, she has spent far longer thinking about how to show something than what to show.
Yet the three solo exhibitions share one feature regardless of their different approaches. Wherever she works, Lee Su-hyeon transforms the entire exhibition into a single landscape. Rather than simply placing works against empty walls or within a given floor plan, she constructs the space itself as her own world, allowing visitors to wander through the world as she encountered it. What is particularly compelling is that this strategy does not read merely as Lee Su-hyeon's personal aesthetic or as an exhibition design device. Instead, it attempts to transfer to the viewer the very structure of the artist's own experience: walking through a place, encountering objects, and discovering a sense of estrangement there. Before grasping the narrative, the viewer encounters the objects; before understanding their context, the viewer is compelled to experience their unfamiliarity. Just as Lee Su-hyeon herself did in the abandoned house in Jangwi-dong, within the grid of Goyang, and in an apartment park in Ulsan.
Yet these forms are still incomplete. The salt is still waiting for another place in which to acquire a new narrative, and the slag has left Ulsan, awaiting a new context on different coordinates. Perhaps one day the jujubes of Jangwi-dong, the salt of Goyang, the slag of Ulsan—and the objects of other cities yet to come—will gather within a single space. After all, coordinates that will never meet on a map are already neighbors within a single person's experience.
2026.8. ACK 발행. ACK (artcritickorea) 글의 저작권은 필자에게 있습니다. August. 2026. Published by ACK. The copyright of the article published by ACK is owned by its author.
2026 ACK ack ack ack: Artist-Critic Matching Program
When the Objects of This World Become the Narratives of Another World
이 세계의 사물이 이세계의 서사가 될 때: 박천
Original text by Cheon Park
Read the original text
번역: 김미혜
Translated by Mihye Kim
1.
Tens of millions of years ago, a single mosquito fell into the sap of a tree and died. The sap hardened into amber, preserving the mosquito inside for tens of millions of years. The idea that an already vanished world could be entirely reconstructed from a single drop of blood left in the mosquito’s belly became a story. We loved that story. It was an absurd fantasy, yet perhaps all the more fascinating because of its absurdity. But for that fantasy to be possible, one crucial premise must hold: the fragment must contain the whole. A single bone must be enough to infer the way its owner walked. A cross-section of rock strata must reveal the climate of millions of years ago. The chemical composition of a single pebble must allow us to trace where it came from.
However, this method has one blind spot. The world reconstructed from a fragment inevitably depends on the imagination of the present moment in which that fragment is discovered. I still remember how startling it was to watch a YouTube video claiming that chickens are the descendants of dinosaurs. I am not sure whether it was because I was eating a descendant of the most colossal and awe-inspiring creatures ever to walk the Earth, or because I simply did not want to believe the hypothesis that those creatures had feathers. In any case, no one can prove what the world of tens of millions of years ago was actually like. The majesty we see inscribed in a fossil may itself be something projected onto it by the imagination of the person who unearthed its bones. What we call reconstruction is, in fact, not the past itself, but a narrative composed in the language of the present by the person who happens to hold that fragment in their hands. The same is true of memory. Contrary to the assumption that memory faithfully reproduces the past, each moment of recollection recreates it within the conditions of that present. The past is never replayed. What is replayed is a past reconstructed by the present.
Lee Su-hyeon’s practice begins with such fragments. The artist collects remnants left behind in the processes of urban formation and disappearance—jujubes from an abandoned house, the familiar strangeness of new towns, slag buried in apartment parks, and so on. These objects can be understood as fragments of the time each place has lived through. However, what the artist does is not to reconstruct the past on the basis of these fragments. Nor is it to reveal what these places were like in earlier times. Starting from the experience of encountering these objects, Lee Su-hyeon instead creates landscapes that do not yet exist. And yet these fragments are each situated on different temporal planes.
2.
In places, time accumulates like a soft layer of snow. In spaces built at that time, someone from that time must have lived, and upon that time, something new is built again. A city repeats this process, endlessly covering over earlier times. Yet even as new buildings rise, new roads are laid, and new parks are created, what came before does not disappear—it merely becomes invisible. And yet, the city continuously performs this “newness” precisely in order to sustain that invisibility.
Contemporary art practices dealing with place often arrive at an attempt to uncover these buried layers of time once again. It seems that moving into residencies, conducting research, recording what has disappeared, and transferring it into exhibition spaces has solidified into a kind of routine convention. Meanwhile, within the concept of site-specific practice, there are two distinct lineages. These are notions of site-specificity represented respectively by Richard Serra and Kwon Miwon. In Serra’s conception of site-specificity, a work is bound to a particular physical coordinate; the moment it is relocated, it loses its force as art. By contrast, Kwon Miwon expands this notion of the coordinate into discourse, redefining the “site” as something that can also encompass social, political, and institutional conditions. Either as attachment or as expansion, most site-related practices are situated somewhere between these two lineages.
3.
Lee Su-hyeon’s first site was an abandoned house—one left vacant through a decade of repeatedly revised redevelopment plans. While walking around the Jangwi-dong area, the artist happened to meet the elderly person who had been the house’s last resident, and through this encounter began collecting the memory of the place. The jujube tree encountered together with the former resident upon entering the empty house was a particularly significant object. In recalling how a tree transplanted during a move in 1989 still stood in the yard, the artist brought back jujubes, laid them out to dry on a bamboo mat, and boiled jujube tea every day to share with visitors. In response to the former resident’s wistful remark that the flowerbed once tended in the front yard no longer existed, the artist filled an unused jade-colored bathtub—no longer connected to running water—with soil and made flowers bloom in it. The dog Bok-sil, who once guarded the house, is also no longer there; yet a sensor was installed under the entrance so that a barking sound plays whenever someone stands at the door. Within the empty house, actions embedded in the resident’s memories were set in motion once again: drying jujubes, boiling tea, tending flowers, barking at the door. Memory remained not as image but as action, and the artist replayed the time of the empty house onto the present by reactivating those actions.
대추 말리기, 2021, 대추, 대나무발, 공간설치
앞마당 화단, 2021, 화초, 공간설치
Practices that engage with the memory of place often tend to adopt the form of a conventional archive. Such archives preserve the past and summon it up again. Yet it is not easy for that past to truly meet the time of the present. The reason Lee Su-hyeon chose to revive the roles of objects was likely not only to record the past, but also to make it function again within the space of the present. This approach can be understood as belonging to the position of site-specificity described by Kwon Miwon, in that it involves staying in a place for an extended period, collecting people’s stories, and reconstructing space on the basis of those narratives.
비로소 마주하다,_전시 전경
4.
For a young artist, such a theoretical background likely operated as an unavoidable framework. It may even be assumed that responding to the social context embedded in a place is the natural mode of site-specific practice. Yet not every place allows for this kind of temporality. Some cities are designed, from the outset, to have no prior time of their own. The city of Goyang is a first-generation new town. Between grid-like residential blocks, apartment complexes and schools are fitted together like pieces of a puzzle, while lakes and parks are distributed in between. It is peaceful. Yet this very peacefulness feels strange. Trees stand where trees are meant to stand, and water lies where water is meant to lie—but everything is too precise. One day, while sitting on a swing in a park, Lee Su-hyeon was approached by a stranger who asked where he should go to find a commercial district, saying he had been walking endlessly without reaching one. In fact, the commercial area was in the very next block; the man’s movement had followed a route designed for strolling. The more perfect the design, the more invisible it becomes. In the theme park built with dinosaurs reconstructed from the blood of a mosquito trapped in amber, the dinosaurs appear alive yet exist only as life within a design. Likewise, the landscape is meant to be something that naturally is on its own, yet it is in fact controlled. This paradox—where perfect reconstruction exposes its own artificiality—strangely overlaps with the planned nature of Goyang.
In the abandoned house in Jangwi-dong, jujubes, a bathtub, and the sound of a barking dog were left behind. The place itself yielded objects. But in Goyang, there were no such objects. In a city where earlier time is not visible at all, there are no fragments that connect past and present. The most accessible carrier of the city’s time was Lee Su-hyeon herself, someone who had been born and raised there. As the artist herself was already functioning as an object that testifies to the city’s time, she had to choose materials in order to translate this condition into images. And so Lee Su-hyeon chose salt. It was an attempt to translate the unstable temporality felt in a rapidly changing new town into the properties of salt—something that shifts, seeps, and crystallizes on its own. Like a Japanese dry landscape garden that recreates nature using only stone and sand, without water, she reconstructed the night waves of Ilsan Lake Park into a landscape using salt and calligraphy ink, and translated the topography of Goyang into a nocturnal landscape veiled in mist.
흩어지는 달빛_전시전경
흩어지는달빛, 2024, 소금에 먹, 암염, 포맥스, 가변설치
Visually, it was convincing. But site-specific art always raises questions of source and justification. Lee Su-hyeon was no exception. Questions arose: why salt was chosen, what relation salt bears to Goyang, and in what context the two might be connected. These questions may also be seen as extending from the trajectory of site-specific practice that began in Jangwi-dong. Nevertheless, Lee Su-hyeon brought salt into the work. It was not because the artist has a particularly salty diet, nor because she has any connection to the sea. Nevertheless, she used salt. It can be read as a declaration that salt—or more broadly, objects—do not necessarily have to be bound to specific places. Bringing a material associated with the sea into a city without the sea does not represent a failure of reference between object and place. Rather, it calls into question the very assumption that only objects tied to a place can speak of that place.
5.
She sought to put that doubt to the test in the city of Ulsan. It was an attempt to continue her exploration of salt's materiality. And, coincidentally, the residency she joined was called “Sogeumnaru” which means “Salt Wharf”. Yeompo-dong—whose name literally means “Salt Port”—is a neighborhood in Ulsan’s Buk-gu (Northern District). This area is said to have once been a port where salt was transported. It may even seem as if salt had been waiting for the artist. Yet, unfortunately, Lee Su-hyeon’s salt was not the salt of this neighborhood. Her salt was saturated with the unstable temporality of the new town; it did not contain the history of Yeompo-dong. It was the same material, but one that held a different narrative. Moreover, the industrial landscape of Ulsan that she encountered was far removed from salt. The city offered abundant stories, from individual lives to industrial history, yet salt could not find its place within any of them. It was not that the object rejected the place; rather, it was the place that did not accept the object.
붉은 착륙지, 2025, 싱글채널비디오, 4K, 2분
붉은 착륙지, 2025, 울산 쇠부리복원사업에서 발생한 슬래그, 토철, 가변설치
It was iron that Lee Su-hyeon discovered through her continued investigation of objects and places. Ulsan still retains the memory of its early iron industry in Dalcheon Iron Mine. At the Urban Regeneration Center, the artist learned of a festival held as part of the Soeburi Restoration Project—soeburi being an old Korean word for iron-making. The iron restoration festival in the city of iron—she likely expected traces of ancient smelting or a site steeped in solemnity. But when she arrived, the park within a residential apartment complex felt much more like a friendly neighborhood festival. It was amid this sense of dissonance—Is this really a festival about iron?—that she encountered a black mass pulled from the furnace. It was slag. What first came to the artist's mind was neither the history of Dalcheon Iron Mine nor the industrial history that had sustained Ulsan. Rather, it looked as though it had suddenly fallen from the sky. Fused into a single hard mass of tangled charcoal, ash, seashells, and iron particles, the lump appeared less like something that belonged to this earth than like something that had flown in from somewhere distant and lodged itself there. Before she could grasp the narrative of the place, it was the estrangement of the object itself that came first.
중력관찰1 탐사코드 D-SL-16, 2025, 슬래그, 스테인레스스틸, 자기부상장치, 135×70×85cm
중력관찰2 정지된 궤도, 2025, 슬래그, 스테인레스스틸, 40×50×80cm
Yet this sense of estrangement was not new. The artist knew she had experienced it before. It was only before the slag that her earlier experiences of those places came sharply into focus: places where the city had been overlaid with newness, where nature—something that should not have been there, yet somehow had to be—had been inserted, and where an indefinable sense of estrangement lingered beneath the orderly grid. The reason the anonymous lump in the apartment park captivated Lee Su-hyeon was that it embodied this estrangement in its most dramatic form.
6.
How, then, can this sense of estrangement be translated into artistic practice? As the artist readily admits, calling slag a meteorite may seem like a childish idea. Yet there is an intriguing background to this childishness: remarkably, the rust-red ground of the Dalcheon Iron Mine, covered in iron oxide, resembles the surface of Mars. The same iron oxide has produced the same color across entirely different times and spaces. In an age when Elon Musk's visions captivate so many people, this reveals just how fragile any attempt to anchor a place—or rather, the narrative of a place—to fixed coordinates can be. The fact that most of the dinosaurs appearing in Jurassic World are actually species from the Cretaceous period may likewise suggest that, in this world, there is always an inevitable gap between what a name points to and what reality actually is. Rather than trying to correct this gap, Lee Su-hyeon amplifies it. Transforming slag into meteorites, Dalcheon into a landing site, and field collection records into an expedition log is not an attempt to recount the history of a place. Instead, it is an effort to translate the sense of estrangement experienced in confronting these objects here and now into the language of another world.
In Serra's conception of site-specificity, an object dies the moment it is removed from its designated coordinates. In Kwon Miwon's account of site-specificity, the site itself escapes its physical coordinates and becomes discourse. Lee Su-hyeon's objects, however, belong to neither category. Even after leaving Ulsan and being placed in an exhibition space in another city, the slag does not die. On the contrary, it is precisely by leaving its original site that the sense of estrangement the artist experienced before the object finally comes into view. What had been merely a stone while buried in an Ulsan’s park begins, the moment it is placed on different coordinates, to appear as estrangement itself. The same is true of the salt. Just as the salt from Goyang carried a different narrative from the salt of Yeompo-dong, an object can speak of the time of a place without belonging to that place. Indeed, it is precisely because it is no longer bound to that place that it is able to speak.
Iron oxide gradually turns red again over time, and salt changes its form in response to humidity. Slag, too, takes on a different hue from one day to the next depending on the humidity conditions in the exhibition space. These objects are not complete. They are still changing. No object is ever truly still. It is only because the pace of their transformation is so slow that we mistake them for something fixed. Perhaps this is why Lee Su-hyeon's practice begins not with controlling materiality, but with observing it.
붉은 착륙지_전시전경1 착륙지 현장
7.
What, then, has Lee Su-hyeon been grappling with all this time? Perhaps she is an artist who collects the stories of places without being particularly interested in conveying those stories as they are. In Jangwi-dong, she approached them through personal narrative; in Goyang, through materiality; and in Ulsan, through the fiction of a science-fictional other world. Across these three solo exhibitions, she has developed three distinct methods. Looking back, however, what she has consistently pursued is not the place itself, but the forms through which a place can be conveyed. In other words, she has spent far longer thinking about how to show something than what to show.
Yet the three solo exhibitions share one feature regardless of their different approaches. Wherever she works, Lee Su-hyeon transforms the entire exhibition into a single landscape. Rather than simply placing works against empty walls or within a given floor plan, she constructs the space itself as her own world, allowing visitors to wander through the world as she encountered it. What is particularly compelling is that this strategy does not read merely as Lee Su-hyeon's personal aesthetic or as an exhibition design device. Instead, it attempts to transfer to the viewer the very structure of the artist's own experience: walking through a place, encountering objects, and discovering a sense of estrangement there. Before grasping the narrative, the viewer encounters the objects; before understanding their context, the viewer is compelled to experience their unfamiliarity. Just as Lee Su-hyeon herself did in the abandoned house in Jangwi-dong, within the grid of Goyang, and in an apartment park in Ulsan.
Yet these forms are still incomplete. The salt is still waiting for another place in which to acquire a new narrative, and the slag has left Ulsan, awaiting a new context on different coordinates. Perhaps one day the jujubes of Jangwi-dong, the salt of Goyang, the slag of Ulsan—and the objects of other cities yet to come—will gather within a single space. After all, coordinates that will never meet on a map are already neighbors within a single person's experience.
2026.8. ACK 발행. ACK (artcritickorea) 글의 저작권은 필자에게 있습니다. August. 2026. Published by ACK. The copyright of the article published by ACK is owned by its author.