Centre Pompidou Hanwha is expanding the art experience beyond the museum and into an outdoor garden.
 
In September, Centre Pompidou Hanwha will present its first garden project, 《Imprinting Time》, in the museum’s outdoor space, the 63 Oudolf Garden. Marking its first attempt to bring contemporary art beyond the conventional exhibition space and into a garden setting, the project proposes a new viewing experience in which art, nature, and the urban landscape converge.
 
As suggested by the project’s title, “Imprinting Time,” the installed works will interact with their surrounding environment—including plants and seasonal changes, the wind and sunlight along the Han River, and rainwater—gradually accumulating new traces over time. Following the garden’s pathways, visitors will experience the ways in which the artworks and their natural surroundings influence and transform one another.

The project brings together three Korean women artists representing different generations: Kim Yun Shin, Meekyoung Shin, and Omyo Cho. Having developed distinctive sculptural languages shaped by different periods and environments, the three artists each explore the relationships between nature and the body, and between time and materiality, in their own ways.
 
Kim Yun Shin reveals the materiality of nature and the movement of the body through painted sculptures cast in metal from forms originally carved in wood.
 
Meekyoung Shin explores the meanings of time and impermanence through soap sculptures of angels that are gradually worn away and transformed through exposure to wind, rain, and air.
 
Omyo Cho examines the relationship between humans and nature through unconventional sculptures that evoke hybrid forms combining plants and the human body, bringing together questions of nature, science, and human existence.

The 63 Oudolf Garden, where the project will take place, was designed by internationally renowned landscape designer Piet Oudolf. His naturalistic approach to landscape design views the processes of growth, decline, and transformation in plants as a landscape in their own right, closely aligning with the project’s focus on the “traces of time.”
 
As the garden’s landscape changes with the seasons, the sculptures by the three artists interact with their surroundings, continually reshaping the relationship between art and nature.
 
The garden project will be unveiled on the evening of September 4 at “63 Night,” a private event held at the 63 Adolphe Garden and Centre Pompidou Hanwha. Organized in conjunction with Frieze Seoul Art Week and Hanwha Group’s major social contribution event, the Seoul International Fireworks Festival, the event will bring together approximately 300 art professionals from Korea and abroad, including Frieze VIPs and collectors.
 
The event will feature the unveiling of the garden project, talks introducing the participating artists and their works, a guided tour of the exhibition at Centre Pompidou Hanwha, and a reception. The project will open to the general public on September 6.

References

• 한화문화재단 보도자료 (Hanwha Foundation of Culture Press Release)
• 퐁피두센터 한화 (Centre Pompidou Hanwha)