The monumental sculptures that long defined the outdoor deck of Leeum Museum of Art have given way to a garden. On April 3, 2026, the museum unveiled Gabriel Orozco Garden, a site-specific installation conceived by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco (b.1962).

Transforming the museum’s approximately 1,650-square-meter outdoor deck into a garden, the work is Leeum’s first commissioned garden project since the museum opened in 2004. The garden is free and open to everyone during the museum’s regular operating hours.
 
 
 
From a Vertical Monument to a Horizontal Environment
 
For more than two decades, Leeum’s outdoor deck served as a prominent site for monumental outdoor sculptures that became visual symbols of the museum. Alexander Calder’s The Big Crinkly was installed there from 2004 to 2005, followed by Louise Bourgeois’s Maman from 2005 to 2012 and Anish Kapoor’s Tall Tree & the Eye from 2012 to 2023.

Rather than placing another monumental object on the deck, Gabriel Orozco Garden incorporates the ground, pathways, stones, plants, benches, architecture, and visitors’ movements into the work itself. The viewer’s gaze shifts downward, from an elevated sculptural object to the stones and plants underfoot, the horizontally unfolding paths, and the movements of people nearby. Sculpture expands from a discrete object into a horizontal environment structured by the body, time, and space.

The Spatial Rhythm of Ten Circles
 
The garden is based on the circle, a recurring motif throughout Orozco’s practice. A geometric arrangement originating from a single circle expands across the entire deck, where circles of varying sizes interconnect to form ten consecutive spaces known as Plazas 1 through 10. Each plaza features a different arrangement of paving, planting, and benches, creating distinct spatial rhythms within the garden as a whole.
 
The garden floor is paved with Boryeong stone quarried in South Chungcheong Province. Rather than being discarded, the jarrah timber previously used for the deck flooring was repurposed as exterior cladding for an adjacent structure. Instead of completely erasing the traces of the former space to install a new work, the project incorporates materials accumulated by the site into its new configuration.
 
 
 
A Living Sculpture Shaped by the Three Friends of Winter
 
The garden’s botanical framework consists of pine, bamboo, and plum trees. It includes 17 pine trees, 11 plum trees, and approximately 1,500 bamboo plants, accompanied by white-flowering species such as Korean viburnum, Thunberg spirea, multiflora rose, and grass-of-Parnassus.
 
Pine, bamboo, and plum are known in East Asian culture as the “Three Friends of Winter” (歲寒三友), as they endure the cold season or blossom in early spring. Orozco introduced this concept into his garden practice, using the three plants as both the botanical foundation and the conceptual structure of the work.

From London and Mexico City to Seoul
 
Gabriel Orozco Garden is the third site-specific garden project the artist has undertaken over the past decade. The first was the permanent garden completed at the South London Gallery in 2016.
 
Designed by Orozco with support from 6a architects and horticulturists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the project transformed a largely inaccessible paved area behind the gallery into a garden.

Its circular structures, constructed from brick and York stone, form a series of small spaces and passageways. The project also includes a planted walkway providing residents of the nearby Sceaux Gardens housing estate with direct access to the gallery. The garden was conceived not only as a sculptural work but also as a communal space in which people could sit, eat, play, and encounter works by other artists.
 
The second was the Chapultepec Nature and Culture project in Mexico City. Beginning in 2019, Orozco led the five-year project as its creative coordinator.
 
The large-scale initiative connects the four sections of Chapultepec Park, which together cover nearly 800 hectares. It restores natural environments and existing cultural institutions while introducing new cultural spaces and pedestrian connections.

An Artist More Interested in Relationships Than Objects
 
Since the early 1990s, Gabriel Orozco has worked across photography, sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation. Rather than relying on specialized art materials or large-scale production facilities, he has focused on objects and traces encountered in streets, studios, and places visited during his travels, as well as on chance situations and everyday movements.
 
Orozco does not necessarily transform familiar objects into entirely new things. Instead, he slightly relocates, cuts, or rearranges existing objects and environments, prompting viewers to perceive them anew. What matters in his practice is not the self-contained completeness of an autonomous object, but the relationships formed between objects and bodies, places and time.

Why Did the Museum Replace Sculpture with a Garden?
 
The sculptures previously installed on Leeum’s outdoor deck asserted the museum’s presence and identity through their monumental physical forms. Works by Calder, Bourgeois, and Kapoor created powerful visual centers that could be recognized from a distance. Orozco’s garden, by contrast, contains no central object that dominates the entire space at a glance. Its place has been taken by pathways and plants, benches and people, seasons and time.
 
What has emerged where monumental sculpture once stood is not a garden without sculpture. The garden itself functions as a horizontal sculpture. The geometry of the ground, the growth of the plants, the movements of visitors, and even the processes required to maintain the space all become part of the conditions of the work.
 
Gabriel Orozco Garden therefore represents not the disappearance of sculpture but an expansion of its boundaries. Where sculpture as a discrete object has receded, pathways, plants, people, and time have begun to create a new form of sculpture.


 
Gabriel Orozco Garden

- Dates: April 3, 2026–
- Venue: Outdoor Deck, Leeum Museum of Art
- Format: Permanent site-specific installation
- Admission: Free
- Hours: Open during Leeum Museum of Art’s regular operating hours