《Still Life: Objects of Our Time》, the first exhibition of the year at Esther Schipper Seoul, is a group presentation featuring fifteen artists based in South Korea.

Revisiting the long-standing tradition of still life painting, the exhibition repositions the genre within contemporary conditions, asking how objects may be sensed, interpreted, and reconsidered today.
 
Spanning multiple generations, the participating artists each produced a new still life painting specifically for this exhibition. Rather than treating still life as a mere mode of representation or as a historical convention, the exhibition focuses on how objects—situated within Korea’s modern history and contemporary culture—carry memory, emotion, and social context. Here, still life no longer functions as a static depiction, but as a site where the personal and the collective, the past and the present intersect.

Sejin Kwon’s Memory Scape_cake readily evokes familiar scenes of celebration through the image of a cake topped with candles, along with the emotions and conventions such imagery typically signifies. Yet by layering white pigment over this recognizable motif and leaving visible traces of brushstrokes, Kwon deliberately pushes the image away from familiarity. In this work, the object ceases to function as a commemorative symbol and instead becomes a blurred, shifting landscape of memory.

In Still Life with Red Roses, Sungsic Moon extends his ongoing rose series by introducing aluminum foil as a new pictorial surface, fundamentally recalibrating the relationship between artist and motif. Unlike the direct reflection of bodily movement seen in his earlier works, the lines drawn on foil—requiring careful control of pressure and speed—inevitably reveal a distance between the artist and the object. The painting foregrounds tension and separation inherent in the act of depiction, rather than intimacy with the motif.

Jeong-A Bang’s You Look Like Me and Feel Bad focuses on the peculiar relationship formed between two objects that resemble one another. Here, the relationship between objects unfolds as an event that precedes the human gaze. The viewer is no longer positioned as a detached observer, but rather stands as another entity confronting an already established relational field.

Shinyoung Park’s What Lies Before Us condenses both the structural chaos of the contemporary moment and the residual traces of historically accumulated events into the form of still life. The objects depicted function as warning signs—symbols that allude to present-day precarity and instability—reaffirming still life painting as a genre that has long indexed the ominous symptoms of its time.

Beyond these works, the exhibition further expands the possibilities of still life through diverse artistic approaches.
 
Jinhee Kim and Jiwon Kim attend to repetition and layering as structural principles, exploring how objects absorb accumulated time and traces of use. In their works, still life appears less as a completed form than as the residue of repeated actions and rhythms, with the sense of labor and temporality embedded in compositional structure.
 
Min Joung-Ki and Nosik Lim intersect still life and landscape, personal memory and social context, situating objects within a broader historical gaze. Though the objects emerge from everyday life, their placement and context evoke the temporal and spatial layers of Korean society.
 
Lee Jinju and Soojung Jung fine-tune the emotional atmosphere of objects through subtle compositional balance and chromatic sensitivity. Their still lifes do not assert clear narratives, but instead generate affective currents through density, spacing, and tonal nuance.
 
Yaerim Ryu focuses on materiality and sensory layers, treating objects less as visual signs than as sites of tactile and perceptual experience.
 
The works of Byungkoo Jeon, Sun Woo, and Jin Han similarly explore issues of vision and relational structure through the arrangement and composition of objects, extending still life into a contemporary pictorial language.
 
《Still Life: Objects of Our Time》does not fix still life as a genre of the past. Rather, it demonstrates how objects continue to serve as viable agents for producing contemporary questions. Silent within the frame, these objects nonetheless carry within them the memory and present of Korean society, as well as the ongoing possibilities of painting as a medium.
 


Exhibition Information
 
Title :《Still Life: Objects of Our Time》
Curated by : Minjin Chae
Artists : Sejin Kwon, Jinhee Kim, Jiwon Kim, Min Joung-Ki, Sungsic Moon, Shinyoung Park, Jeong-A Bang, Nosik Lim, Lee Jinju, Geun-Taek Yoo, Yaerim Ryu, Byungkoo Jeon, Soojung Jung, Sun Woo, Jin Han
Exhibition Dates : January 14 – February 14, 2026
Opening Hours : Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00 AM–6:00 PM
Venue : Esther Schipper Seoul (40 Bukchon-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul)
Website / Instagram : estherschipper.com / @estherschipper