Connected Senses: Some Images Perceived (2023)

Kim, A-young (Curator)

Translated from the original Korean

In this exhibition, artist Huh Nae-hoon begins from the proposition that “the eye does not see what is visible, but what it wants to see.” From this premise, she explores the perceptual limitations shaped by accumulated experience and entrenched preconceptions. To articulate this inquiry, Huh collects and documents materials encountered in everyday life. These accumulated fragments become the basis for works realized through sculpture, installation, video, photography, and performance. By isolating specific sensory components—visual, auditory, and tactile—she reinterprets them into newly configured forms. Rather than assembling objects, her process dismantles them, transforming familiar elements into unexpected subjects. Through an investigation of the relationships between “I,” “we,” and “structure,” Huh reveals condensations and crossings of time, the junctions between interior and exterior space, and shifts in fixed assumptions.

In Hindurchsehen (Looking Through) (2018), a telescope installation invites viewers to observe an external scene, only to confront an unexpected image: via a live action camera feed, the viewer sees the crown of their own head—an angle normally inaccessible. The telescope, constructed from a discarded object, retains its external form while its original function is removed. By severing function from form, Huh destabilizes the habitual order of perception and directly questions the act of “seeing” itself.

Influenced by Roman Signer’s moving sculptures that capture ephemeral moments, Huh has long been interested in time-embedded sculpture and elements of destruction. Drawing from Henri Bergson’s notion that matter consists of an infinite sum of images, she considers representation not as a fixed depiction, but as a relationship formed between the perceiver and one of the many possible images of matter. Based on this understanding, she does not confine herself to a single medium. Instead, she constructs works that intersect performance, spatial installation, video, photography, text, and sculpture—seeking configurations that sustain tension and wit.

In Einsickern (Seeping) (2016) and Schaum (Foam) (2015), slowly vanishing foam becomes a material through which moments of generation and disappearance are rendered visible. In Seeping, the artist repeatedly sprays foam onto a pedestal, allowing it to accumulate before dissipating into the air or absorbing into the surface. The process and its gradual traces are documented as both sculpture and video. In Foam, close-up black-and-white imagery transforms ephemeral foam into an abstract landscape, evoking the cyclical emergence and dissolution of form.

36.5° Sculpture (2023) is engineered to maintain the temperature of the human body. When touched, its heated cylindrical surface emits warmth comparable to 36.5 degrees Celsius. Grounded in the idea that we see not simply with our eyes but through the interpretive constructions of the brain, the work questions what we believe we are seeing. To visualize the invisible, Huh produces a sculpture that must be touched in order to be understood. It induces tension while rendering relative time and imperceptible phenomena sensorially tangible. The passive positions of both artist and viewer shift into that of observers who engage with time, movement, and bodily presence. By examining how different modes of viewing nevertheless produce a stable image, Huh prompts reflection on the limits of human cognition.

Nahaufnahme (Close-up) (2020), a photographic close-up of the artist’s face, presents an abstract field composed of layered red tonal planes reminiscent of blood. The divisions within the composition are structured by a mask punctured at regular intervals. Through handheld close-up filming, the image condenses into a single photograph composed of aggregated red surfaces. This exploration of scale—magnifying the minute into a collective field—investigates visual communication and the mechanics of perception.

In Nicht künstlich und künstlich (Not Artificial and Artificial) (2021), what initially appears to be a photograph of potted plants reveals, upon closer inspection, a mixture of real and artificial specimens coexisting within the same space. By installing both and presenting them as a single scene, Huh foregrounds the instability between authenticity and fabrication. Even when an object is perceived in different ways, it is often recognized as a singular image—revealing another cognitive limitation.

Huh has also explored the human body as a site for sharing personal experience and emotion. By isolating and abstracting parts of the body across multiple media, she examines form, color, texture, and tactility. These bodily investigations extend toward broader communicative structures shaped by individual memory and feeling. Through research-based inquiry, scientific principles, and material experimentation, she expands the conceptual boundaries of sculpture. Spatial installations employing diverse materials embody the flow of time while intensifying sensory experience.

By gathering random elements into coherent sculptural form, Huh articulates a distinct sensibility that emphasizes the temporality embedded in matter. The accumulation of time, strangeness, and unexpectedness within her work emerges as a new visual stimulus. Her transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar is meticulous, delicate, and charged with tension. This distinctive formal language arises from a sustained seriousness and persistence—an ongoing process of internalizing, dismantling, and reconstructing perception itself.