SEOUL.- For artists, a place is never a mere backdrop; it is the site where thought and action intersect. The exhibition In Situ introduces ARKO Art Studio, which just opened in 2025, and seeks to connect the artists’ sites of creation with the present space of the ARKO Art Center under the shared theme of “three places.” Each site shaped by the gaze and gestures of the artists holds layers of time and sensibilities, and within these overlapping strata, we encounter how art comes into being here and now.

The first place—ARKO Art Center

Situated within Marronnier Park in Daehangno, northern Seoul, the ARKO Art Center was designed by architect Kim Swoo Geun and completed in 1979. Since then, it has accompanied the major currents of contemporary Korean art. Using brick, a traditional material, Kim sought to realize an open space that would link the area, art, and people. Through solid structure and the placement of windows that invite light, he wished for art to permeate everyday life. This architectural intent remains palpable today throughout the museum, where countless experiments and discourses by artists have continued to accumulate over time.

The second place—ARKO Art Studio (Pyeongchang-dong)

The second place is the newly launched ARKO Art Studio in Pyeongchang-dong, Seoul, which opened its doors to artists in 2025. The neighborhood of Pyeongchang-dong has not only served as a home to many artists for quite a long time, but has also formed an artistic ecosystem where galleries, museums, and workshops coexist. ARKO Art Studio was established as a creative base where artists reside and are free to explore possibilities in their work.

The actual floor plans of this studio are drawn on the first and second floors of the exhibition venue. This is a creative way to bring the structure of the residency into the museum, allowing the “working time” of artists to be shared with visitors. Even without visiting the studio itself, visitors can walk across the drawings and imagine the spaces where the artists’ creations first took shape. Although located in different places, the exhibition sought to visually convey that the art center and the residency are connected within the structure of an artistic cycle.

The third place—the artists’ own places

The third place belongs to the artists themselves, the unique sites from which they have come. The participating artists—hailing from Korea, Austria, Finland, Japan, Mozambique, Poland and Vietnam—bring with them sensibilities distilled from their own environments and cultures, transforming these into works presented here. In this context, “place” signifies more than a geographic coordinate; it is the artist’s way of perceiving the world and sensing existence—an experiential condition where environment, identity, and memory intersect.

In Situ unfolds as an architecture of overlapping and connected places within a single field: the museum. The space and time of the ARKO Art Center and ARKO Art Studio in Pyeongchang-dong intersect within the exhibition venue, where the time of artists who have completed their residencies meets that of those just beginning new works. In this convergence, In Situ captures the moment where past and present, as well as real and imagined places, meet in one place, providing an opportunity where visitors can experience the artist's site in a multidimensional way.

First floor—first-term artists of the ARKO Art Studio

On the first floor of the exhibition venue are the works of the first cohort of ARKO residency artists: Yuske Taninaka (Japan), Bùi Bảo Trâm (a.k.a. Rab, Vietnam), Soomin Shon (Korea), Hyangro Yoon (Korea), and Valter Tornberg (Finland). Within the urban context of Seoul, each artist explores the notion of “site” in different ways, revealing layers of contemporary experience through distinct languages—those of the body, institutions, myths, networks, and images. Their works are the condensed results of contemplation, experimentation, and observation during the residency period, forming multilayered scenes that document the artist’s present within the city’s time.

Second floor—second-term artists of the ARKO Art Studio

The second floor presents the works of five artists who have recently arrived in Korea and begun new projects: Katarzyna Mazur (Poland), Hugo Mendes (Mozambique), Christian Schwarz (Austria), Hee Seo (Korea), and Junghae Park (Korea). Based on the materials, memories, and landscapes encountered in their period of stay, they expand the notion of the residency as a site of their creation. Within this space where individual artists’ cultural backgrounds and sensory languages intersect, their works unfold as ongoing processes, seeking to share with the visitors the time of creation inherent in the residency.

As we have seen, the time each artist spends within a new environment leaves distinct traces upon their work. For instance, Hee Seo transforms the precariousness of a temporary dwelling into a spatial vibration infused with the rhythm of impermanence and movement, while Hugo Mendes intertwines the manual process of woodblock printing with regional signs and fragments of maps, transmuting colonial remnants into ritual imagery and reinterpreting the act of staying within historical context. For Valter Tornberg, he collects fragments of institutional language encountered on site, returning them as gestures within new frameworks, while Hyangro Yoon distills her observations of water, light, and temporal flow from a city’s periphery into the language of painting. In their own ways, all the participating artists visualize the conditions of “staying,” inscribing the time and sensations of their sites into the very structure of their works.

Perhaps the time the artists have spent in residence, their habitual routes, and the materials and words gathered from their surroundings are more deeply embedded in the process of formation than in the finished results. This exhibition understands that process as in situ—the condition of creation that arises precisely “on site”—and seeks to reveal the traces of these working grounds as they are. In this sense, In Situ extends the conventional notion of “site-specificity” in contemporary art beyond spatial context to encompass the time of creation, the relationships formed, and the choices made to conduct any operation.