Installation view of 《Garden of Turmoil》 ©Thaddaeus Ropac
Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul presents a solo
exhibition 《Garden of Turmoil》
by artist Heemin Chung, on view through February 7, 2026.
The exhibition explores the sensory
experience of a world that is increasingly mediated by technology. In her
artworks, Chung examines the material potential of digital imagery to reimagine
the virtual landscape in painterly and sculptural terms.
Installation view of 《Garden of Turmoil》 ©Thaddaeus Ropac
The exhibition’s title 《Garden of Turmoil》 reflects the anxieties of
the digital age and a world perceived through screens. Like the garden, Chung
conceives of the virtual domain as a human-made ecology: a simulacrum in which
images – like living organisms – propagate.
Two bronze sculptures, There She
was Found Pulled and Folded 1 and There She was Found Pulled
and Folded 2 (2025), resemble tangled tree branches or helical
strands of DNA. Their hybrid forms, like those encrusted in her paintings,
emerge through processes of digital distortion. Evoking glitches, variations
and mutations, they capture the tension between order and entropy that defines
both natural and digital systems.
Installation view of 《Garden of Turmoil》 ©Thaddaeus Ropac
In 《Garden of
Turmoil》, Chung depicts a landscape in which the
boundaries between nature and the artificial, order and chaos, mutually
presuppose and coexist with one another. By pulling disparate worlds and
sensibilities into a single pictorial plane, Chung unfolds a contemporary
landscape where chaos and order, growth and decay, control and fluidity
coexist.
