Installation view of Arrangement Within Arrangements, 2026
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Installation view of the Solo Exhibition of Arrangement Within Arrangements
Installation at SOMA Museum of Art, Seoul
The “window facing the street,” a spatial device Rainer Maria Rilke described at length in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), is not simply an architectural feature or a boundary dividing inside and outside. It can be understood through another lens, as a concept of distance, an apparatus of the gaze that creates an absolute space that is close yet unreachable, moving beyond immersion in or identification with the object. Everyday spaces and objects are not uniform things; they exist as assemblages in which each structure, object, and place is intertwined with others and constantly reconstructs meaning and form across multiple layers and relationships. In the exhibition Arrangement Within Arrangements at the SOMA Museum of Art, the artist examines the points where complex and heterogeneous systems overlap through arrangements that contain this sense of absolute space.
The exhibition title, “Arrangement Within Arrangements," relates to the way windows facing the street are positioned between different spaces. It reveals what had previously gone unseen in the gaps between various entities, such as object and subject, material and immaterial, presence and absence, and it becomes a medium that stirs invisible tension and anxiety by reminding us of what is unreachable rather than offering direct intervention. The other spaces and entities that exist between these windows each follow their own order and logic of arrangement. The window, which makes the act of seeing possible, allows these elements to operate from a distance through the gaze and “awakens and arranges the power hidden within a single object while keeping its distance.”1) Here, arrangement functions as a foreign device within structures, a way for invisible spatial orders to remain connected, moving beyond a purely formal dimension.