A Hidden Realm, a solo exhibition by the Korean artist Goyoung, is on view at AWASE gallery in Shinjuku, Tokyo, through Sunday 20 September. Born in Seoul in 2000 and currently enrolled in the graduate programme at Ewha Womans University, Goyoung is presenting her first solo exhibition here.
Working Method
Goyoung’s working method begins with collecting fragments of images: the surface of soil, plants, the swell of water, the wall of a building, food, a crease in clothing. Whatever catches her eye in daily life is recorded and stocked away. The collected fragments are cut away from their original places and roles, and set down onto the picture plane. Things that would never have been neighbours meet there, and an ecosystem that does not exist in reality is built up.
One source of these images is nature — soil, plants, terrain, living creatures. The other is what people have made: architecture, food, clothing. The exhibition divides the two across the room, showing Substratum and The Unfinished Habitat facing one another.
The artist calls this gesture pareidolia. According to Wikipedia, pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon — an illusion — in which we perceive a familiar and meaningful pattern, such as a human face or an animal, within vague visual or auditory information.
Substratum
Substratum, which the artist herself regards as the central work of the exhibition, is 3.9 metres wide. It condenses the themes of the show — the earth and the ocean, and the light that illuminates them all — into a single scene.
The image reads as the roots of a tree set into the earth, as the depths of the sea, and as a space in which sky and ground have been inverted. Through this ambiguity, the artist says, she wanted to depict a state in which the boundaries by which we divide the world have disappeared. Soil and sea, plant and animal, the living and the inanimate: things assumed to be separate seem to circulate as matter making up one and the same world.
Somewhere within it, a bird-like form gazes out. Not a particular creature, the artist says, but a presence placed there to look quietly upon this unfamiliar world.
The title, Substratum, means the base layer lying beneath the surface. The artist calls the painting a prototype of a world that has not yet been named.
Read the artist’s own text on this work
Returning Without Arrival
In this square painting, creatures that suggest the sea — a crayfish, a fish — share the space with winged forms. A surface that looks like a cliff reads equally as deep-sea terrain, water and earth seeping into one another.
Beings that would belong to separate places gather as one within the work. They seem to be moving in a shared direction, yet they never reach a definite destination, circling and drifting slowly within the frame. This faint sense of direction, the artist writes, creates the feeling of an invisible centre.
The work’s title is Returning Without Arrival. Returning does not necessarily mean going back to where one was before. Perhaps the very process of moving and circulating without end is itself a kind of return.
Read the artist’s own text on this work
Ripening
This work began from imagining the moment when something fills slowly from within, ripens, and turns into another state. The forms recall parts of familiar living things — plants, fruit, insects, tissue — without ever settling into a single identifiable subject.
The title points to an intermediate state of change: a stretch of time that has neither fully arrived nor disappeared, in which change continues on the inside.
Read the artist’s own text on this work
The Unfinished Habitat
A series of four works assembled from non-living fragments found in the human world. A scene that should have been built only from human traces nonetheless emerged, the artist says, as something desolate and incomplete: like a collapsing building, a ruin, or a planet where life has yet to take hold.
Caught between the ideal and the real, she rearranged fragments of reality in an attempt to approach the ideal scene she wished for. What appeared at the end of that process was a landscape in which devastation and vitality strangely coexist.
A sphere recurs across all four panels; it was inspired, the artist tells us, by the round fragment of an egg yolk. Removed from its context the sphere can be an egg or a marble, or be read as the trace of a person or of life. In a landscape that appears to have stopped, only the sphere keeps moving, searching for somewhere else.
On the arrangement facing the large-scale Substratum, the artist writes: the two works set out from different worlds, the human and the natural, yet in the end they exist entangled within one space — not as opposites, but as two landscapes that make up the same world and affect one another.
Read the artist’s own text on this work
Shelter
Two small works hang in the little room by the windows. One of them is Shelter, which began from imagining scattered things entangling into a small world of their own, and holding and protecting something within it.
At the centre of the picture is a form condensed like a nest, with another form positioned above as if to enclose it. Less a particular creature, the artist says, than a presence that shelters and cares for something held inside itself.
The nest here is not a wholly safe place but something closer to a temporary resting place, built imperfectly from fragments gathered nearby. What protects, and what is protected? Where does a life end and its surrounding environment begin? Those boundaries, too, are left unclear.
A nest found in nature, and a dwelling built by people. The artist describes Shelter as a primordial image of different beings forming relations, staying, and making a small territory in which to stay and protect one another.
Read the artist’s own text on this work
Holding Light
In the gallery there is one work whose support differs from the rest: Holding Light, painted in watercolour on buffalo hide. The hide is larger than the panel, and its overflowing edge is pinned to the wall still rippling.
The artist came to see animal hide as a membrane. Hide was once the outermost surface of a living body, receiving light, air and temperature directly. Fragments of nature are inscribed upon it in watercolour, still held short of settling into a landscape.
Through this, the artist says, she sought to capture the way light, matter and fragments of life mingle as they become a world.
Read the artist’s own text on this work
A Hidden Realm runs through Sunday 20 September. The gallery is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and admission is free.
The descriptions of individual works in this article have been compiled by the art on editorial team from the artist’s own text, written in Korean and distributed at the venue.
Goyoung
Born in Seoul, Korea in 2000. She graduated from the Department of Fine Art, College of Art & Design, Ewha Womans University in 2025, and is currently enrolled in the university’s graduate school.
In 2025 she received the Grand Prize at the 1st Haeseok Art Scholarship Competition in Busan, and the IN Award of Cheonman Art for Young.
Her group exhibitions include Seeing, Again at Tang Contemporary Art Seoul (2026), AWASE Gallery 1st Anniversary at AWASE gallery, Tokyo (2026), and Tabula Rasa: Painting the Era at the Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul Arts Center (2025). She has shown at art fairs including The Preview Seongsu in Seoul, Crossover at MYAF in Tokyo, and Art Asia Delhi in New Delhi.
