Park Han-sol reports on Korea's financial regulators, along with fintech and insurance. She previously wrote about the art world, from biennales and exhibitions to fairs and auctions, with a focus on Seoul and the figures shaping the scene. Before joining The Korea Times, she spent a year at ABC News' Seoul bureau, contributing to coverage of major Asia-Pacific events.
What comes after politics? Artists turn toward personal at Atelier Hermes
Installation view of the group exhibition "The Second Life" at Atelier Hermes in southern Seoul / Courtesy of the artists and Fondation d'entreprise Hermes
By Park Han-sol
We live in a time when contemporary art exhibitions are churned out at a dizzying pace, many orbiting what have become familiar axes: social inequality, the climate crisis, the tangled bonds between humans and nonhumans, digital culture and artificial intelligence (AI).
These are, as Atelier Hermes’ artistic director Ahn So-yeon notes, urgent and necessary conversations that are rightly at the forefront. Yet, within this trend, Ahn offers a quieter shift. Rather than placing art in the service of political virtue or social critique, she turns its gaze inward — to the personal, the intimate, the introspective.
For her, the way an individual life stretches, fractures and reshapes beyond the bounds of sociopolitical discourse opens up a different, but no less vital, line of inquiry.
Gathered under her curatorial vision are five Korean artists and collectives — Bek Hyun-jin, Han & Mona, Lee Yona, Park Min-ha and Kim Bo-kyung — for the group exhibition “The Second Life” at Atelier Hermes in southern Seoul.
Tucked inside the flagship store of the French luxury design house, the gallery’s compact footprint means the five creatives’ self-reflective, isolated works inevitably brush up against one another physically, as well as metaphorically.
Han & Mona's "LISTEN, I KNOW" (2025) / Courtesy of the artists and Fondation d'entreprise Hermes
Han & Mona is an Edinburgh-based duo formed by Korean artist Mona Yoo and Chinese artist Hanqing Ma, who is of Hui descent, a Chinese-speaking Muslim minority.
Their lives are shaped by the constant negotiation of cross-cultural differences: upbringing, language and religion. Their new commission, “LISTEN, I KNOW,” is an outdoor digital installation composed of two flickering Morse code signals. Facing each other, the lights spell out two deceptively simple phrases — “listen” and “I know” — words the two often exchange in everyday conversation.
“When spoken gently, those words carry a sense of understanding,” remarked curator Ahn at a recent preview. “But with a sharper tone, they can quickly become charged, even confrontational. The piece visualizes that process of collision, reconciliation and quiet negotiation that come with living and working together.”
Yoo shared that the idea was born during the COVID-19 lockdown in the U.K., when a broken light outside their home kept flickering, unattended, for nearly six months.
“Watching it blink endlessly, I felt like it was crying out to me,” she recalled, its rhythm eerily reminiscent of Morse code. “Because English is our second language, our conversations often rely on short, simple words. And ‘listen’ and ‘I know’ are phrases we use all the time. The two flickering signals capture so much and reflect how we communicate, in all their pauses and gaps.”
Lee Yona's "Roomwall" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Fondation d'entreprise Hermes
Meanwhile, Lee, who left her hometown of Busan for New Zealand at the age of 11, channels her lifelong experience of crossing hemispheres into stainless-steel sculptures under the theme of “In-Transit.”
Inspired by handrails, stair railings and turnstiles, her installations evoke the impersonal architecture of so-called “non-places” — sites like airports and trains, perpetually suspended between departure and arrival.
Yet amid the steel’s cold surface, Lee inserts soft interruptions: a couch, a bench and a bed. In this liminal space, the boundary between public and private begins to blur, pointing to the quiet ambivalence of a life lived between worlds.
“The Second Life” runs through Oct. 5.