ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL presents LIM Subeom’s solo exhibition《Last Night’s Golden Dragon Mirage》from July 1 to August 15, 2026. Marking the artist’s first solo exhibition with ARARIO GALLERY, the exhibition brings together 62 works, including paintings and ceramic works, to explore beings and worlds that cannot be fully defined through human language and perception.

LIM Subeom’s practice begins with a curiosity about the origins of nature and matter. He has long imagined beings that cannot be fully grasped through human systems of perception and understanding. The creatures that appear in his paintings cannot be clearly identified as gods or monsters, guardians or threatening others. Through these ambiguous figures, the artist questions the ways in which humans classify the world and impose hierarchies upon it.
 
The “mirage” in the exhibition title refers to an image that appears clearly before the eye but can never be reached. It symbolizes the gap between perceiving the world and believing that it has been fully understood. Through painting, LIM proposes the possibility that beings we have not yet seen or named may continue to exist beyond the boundaries of human perception.

From a Human-Centered World to a Relational World
 
LIM views the world not as a hierarchical structure organized around humanity, but as a network of relationships connecting diverse forms of existence. Humans do not occupy the center of his works. Instead, undefined beings emerge as central presences within both the paintings and the exhibition space.
 
The artist does not attempt to provide a definitive explanation of the invisible world or reduce it to a fixed form. Rather, he combines elements drawn from nature, mythology, ancient artifacts, and popular culture to create creatures that resist established systems of classification. In doing so, he reveals that the boundaries humans have constructed to understand the world are neither absolute nor permanent.

Gods That Guard the Boundary, Monsters That Block the Way
 
A central motif in the exhibition is the East Asian Four Symbols: the Azure Dragon, White Tiger, Vermilion Bird, and Black Tortoise. Historically, these figures guarded the four cardinal directions and protected the tomb as a symbolic world of its own. Drawing on the Four Symbols murals of the Kangso Great Tomb, LIM transforms these ancient beings through a contemporary visual language.
 
In his work, however, the Four Symbols do not retain a fixed identity as benevolent guardians. To those inside the boundary, they may provide protection. To those approaching from outside, they may appear as fearsome monsters blocking entry. The same figure can therefore shift between god and monster, guardian and threat, depending on the viewer’s position.
 
Through this duality, LIM shows that distinctions between “us” and “the other,” inside and outside, normal and abnormal are also produced by particular perspectives and systems of order.

What Does the Monster Reveal?
 
Monsters have long functioned as visual forms through which humans represent incomprehensible worlds and social boundaries. They reveal what a society defines as normal and what it excludes as other, making visible the limits of the systems humans construct.
 
For this reason, what matters is not only the monster’s appearance, but who defines it as monstrous and what forms of fear and anxiety are projected onto it. The monster reveals not only something about the unfamiliar being itself, but also the ignorance and perceptual limitations of the human observer.
 
In LIM’s work, gods and monsters are not oppositional beings. The sacred and the fearful, the familiar and the strange coexist within a single body. Rather than assigning fixed meanings to his figures, the artist presents them as beings whose meanings shift according to perspective and relational context.

Strangeness Discovered Within Familiarity
 
The beings created by LIM do not follow the threatening appearance traditionally associated with monsters. Their rounded, soft contours, innocent expressions, and animation-like features initially appear friendly and approachable.
 
Yet the longer they are observed, the more they remain familiar yet unmistakably nonhuman. They may appear cute and recognizable, but their identities and emotions cannot be clearly defined.
 
This ambiguity recalls pareidolia, the human tendency to perceive faces or familiar forms in indistinct visual stimuli. Humans project their own expressions and emotions onto nonhuman forms, attempting to draw unfamiliar beings back into human-centered systems of interpretation. LIM uses familiarity as a point of entry into an unknown world, while ensuring that his figures never become fully understandable or completely interpretable.

Unfinished Narratives and Layered Pictorial Spaces
 
LIM’s paintings are not organized around a single center or a completed narrative. One pictorial space opens onto another, beyond which mountains, cosmic expanses, dragons, clouds, and recurring landscapes continue to unfold.
 
The artist constructs his compositions by juxtaposing and layering multiple images and narratives. Depending on where the viewer’s attention is directed, different stories emerge, while the positions of center and periphery continue to shift.
 
This structure resists reducing the world to a single meaning. Endless expanses of space and landscape suggest that worlds and narratives continue to exist beyond the limits of human perception. In LIM’s paintings, stories do not arrive at a conclusion. They begin again where the human gaze comes to a stop.
 
 
 
Bringing Ancient Time into the Contemporary Image
 
LIM discovers a sense of deep time in ancient artifacts and murals encountered in museums. For him, an artifact is not an outdated object confined to the past, but a material presence that has survived through an extended duration and reached the present.
 
In his recent paintings, he scatters sand across the canvas and repeatedly applies thin layers of diluted acrylic paint to create surfaces reminiscent of the murals in the Kangso Great Tomb. The paint seeps and spreads across the rough ground, producing a weathered texture similar to that of an ancient wall painting.
 
Through this process, acrylic paint, a material associated with modern Western painting, is transformed into a surface evocative of traditional East Asian pigments and murals. Rather than reproducing images from the past, LIM translates the material sense of accumulated time into the language of contemporary painting.

Ceramic Time Carried into the Future
 
The exhibition also presents ceramic works alongside paintings. LIM began studying ceramics between 2022 and 2023, imagining how beings in the distant future might interpret his works if they were one day discovered.
 
Ceramics, formed when clay is hardened through fire, can function as a medium of preservation capable of enduring long periods of time. By placing the imagined beings from his paintings into ceramic form, the artist gives them a more enduring material presence.
 
This is not simply a process of translating two-dimensional forms into sculpture. It explores how images originating in ancient artifacts might pass through contemporary painting and ceramics before being encountered by other beings in the distant future.
 
 
 
Where the Human Gaze Comes to a Stop
 
《Last Night’s Golden Dragon Mirage》is more than an exhibition of imaginary creatures. It asks how humans divide the world and determine what is recognized as divine or monstrous, human or nonhuman.
 
By reinterpreting ancient myths, artifacts, the Four Symbols, and monstrous forms through a contemporary visual language, LIM proposes possibilities of existence beyond a human-centered worldview. In his work, god and monster, familiarity and strangeness, past and future are not separated, but coexist within a single image and a single being.
 
Like a mirage that remains visible yet can never be grasped, the beings in LIM’s works stay beyond the limits of human understanding while continuously drawing the gaze toward them. The limit of human perception is not the end of the world, but the point from which other beings and relationships can begin to be imagined.

About the Artist
 
LIM Subeom was born in Gwangju in 1997. He received his BFA in Western Painting from the Department of Fine Arts at Jeonbuk National University in 2022 and completed the coursework for a master’s degree in Fine Arts at Chonnam National University in 2026.
 
He has held solo exhibitions at Space Binteul, Sahng-up Gallery, and Art Space Jip. He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Asia Culture Center, POSCO Art Museum Gwangyang, DDF, the Gwangju Pavilion of the Gwangju Biennale, ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL, Horanggasy Creative Studio’s Glass Polygon and Base Polygon, Daejeon Museum of Art, and Sansu Ssari.
 
He participated in the Gwangju Museum of Art Young Artist Support Center program in 2022 and the H Art Lab Residency in 2026. His works are held in the collections of the Jeonnam Museum of Art, Gwangju Museum of Art, and the ARARIO Collection.

ARARIO GALLERY
 
ARARIO GALLERY is a contemporary art gallery with spaces in Korea and China. Its program spans emerging artists as well as internationally active mid-career and established figures, presenting exhibitions across painting, sculpture, installation, video, and other media.
 
ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL makes use of galleries with distinct ceiling heights and spatial characteristics, presenting exhibitions in which the works engage closely with the surrounding architecture. In the present exhibition, the basement level is transformed into a site where LIM Subeom’s mythological beings and unknown worlds emerge.
 

 
Exhibition Information
 
Exhibition: LIM Subeom《Last Night’s Golden Dragon Mirage》
Dates: July 1–August 15, 2026
Venue: ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL, B1
Number of works: 62, including paintings and ceramic works

References

• ARARIO GALLERY