Adrián Villar Rojas: The Language of the Enemy
Art Sonje Center, 3 September-1 February 2026
Adrián Villar Rojas transforms Art Sonje Center into an experimental stage adrift in time and space, reimagining the museum as a post-Anthropocene site that transcends the constraints of our contemporary conditions. The Language of the Enemy brings together a constellation of large-scale site-specific installations and sculptural works from his ongoing series The End of Imagination, begun in 2022, to configure a fully immersive environment that envelops the entire museum.
In his materials-based practice, the Argentinian artist has long examined the complex relationships between diverse life forms in the face of global crisis. Here, he combines soil, pumice stone and wood ash, along with inorganic and synthetic matter such as recycled plastics and waste foundry sand, into hulking masses that connote a world beyond the limits of human imagination.
The exhibition’s transportive affect begins at the entrance, which is blocked by a mound of earth, and continues into the galleries, where all the partition walls, signage and institutional infrastructure are stripped away. Even the museum’s environmental control systems are disabled, returning the venerable Art Sonje Center to a pseudo-primordial state. Amid this unstable environment marked by cycles of collapse, evolution and regeneration, Villar Rojas challenges visitors to re-examine the structures of the world they consider real.
Candice Lin’s Forms of Innocence (2025) from the Gallery Hyundai exhibition
Photo: Paul Salveson, courtesy of the artist and Francois Ghebaly
Kang Seung Lee and Candice Lin: Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me
Gallery Hyundai, until 5 October
Gallery Hyundai presents a rare two-person exhibition featuring Asian diasporic artists Kang Seung Lee and Candice Lin, whose disparate material vocabularies align in works that engage with personal, political and collective histories that have been marginalised, silenced or forgotten. Borrowing its title from the D.H. Lawrence poem Song of a Man Who Has Come Through, this exhibition explores approaches to authorship wherein art is not owned or possessed but rather transmitted, envisioning the self as a permeable vessel shaped by forces beyond the individual.
The queer body is conceived as a living archive in Lee’s recent works, and the skin as a site of accumulated memory, shaped by time and experience. Through labour-intensive methodologies such as drawing, embroidery, assemblage and video, Lee ritualises acts of remembrance in tribute to the legacy of transnational queer histories.
Lin investigates constructions of race, gender, animality and humanness through the lens of colonial violence and systems of control. Her materially experimental works challenge the taxonomic structures that underpin colonial ideologies, rendering visible what has been silenced and giving form to what has been lost.
Hyun Nahm’s Home (2025). Through sculpture, video, drawing and photography, the artist examines today’s hyper-connected world
© The artist and Whistle
Hyun Nahm: Nest in the Field
Whistle, until 18 October
Since bursting onto the South Korean art scene in 2020, the sculptor Hyun Nahm has earned widespread acclaim for his post-apocalyptic aesthetic and use of non-traditional materials such as polystyrene foam and sulphur.
Nest in the Field signals a departure from the evocative towering forms, modelled after mobile phone masts, that defined the past five years of his artistic production. But Hyun’s enduring interest in the anxieties and uncertainties surrounding today’s hyper-connected network communications infrastructure continues to inform his new bodies of work presented at Whistle.
A series of aggressively angular sculptures serve as the show’s conceptual and material nucleus, their jagged edges and dense black tones created from masses of iron powder that Hyun shapes under strong magnetic fields. Complementing these works are abstract drawings comprised of markings left behind by electrolysed copper and tin crystals, and a new video work documenting Hyun’s descent into an abandoned mineshaft where electromagnetic signals cannot reach, accompanied by the crackling echo of a distant radio frequency detector.
A 1960s space-race era image by Ikhyun Gim from the Melancholia show
Courtesy of Primary Practice
Melancholia
Primary Practice, until 11 October
Curated by Kim Sung woo, the group show Melancholia traces how melancholy has been understood, from ancient times (an imbalance caused by an excess of black bile) to the Renaissance (a privileged condition of creative introspection) and into modernity (a diagnosable form of major depressive disorder).
Four Millennial Korean artists—Daum Kim, Dong Hyuk Lee, Ikhyun Gim and Jinseung Jang—probe the fraught tension associated with both longing and acquiescence. Installed within the non-profit space Primary Practice, their works of video, photography, painting and installation foreground the profound sense of loss that emerges after mourning subsides. This melancholy is not so different from the chronic fatigue induced by the demand for constant productivity that disproportionately afflicts younger generations, provoking reassessments of the foundational belief systems that sustain perceptions of reality.
