[Gallery Walk] Six Floors of Vacancy, Senses Left Behind by the City

Vacant Space Project Special Exhibition "find and found"
How Discarded Wires, Plastic Bags, and Deodorant Shape the Time of Vacancy
An Exhibition Where Light, Humidity, Scent, and Vibration Awaken the Building Again

The ceiling retains the office's fluorescent lights and ventilation ducts. While the walls are painted white, they do not possess the neutrality typically associated with white walls. The floor is scattered with wires, sand, gauze, wooden beams, metal structures, a fan and a fish tank, and the scent of deodorant. This exhibition does not function as a way to fill an empty space. Instead, it asks what was already left behind in a space that was believed to be empty.

Exhibition view of the vacant space project exhibition 'find and found'. Vacant Space Project

The special exhibition 'find and found' by the Vacant Space Project, which has temporarily occupied a six-story vacant building in Yeoksam-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, is, as its title suggests, positioned between 'searching' and 'finding.' However, these two words are not mere wordplay. Searching is an act with intent and direction. Finding is an encounter that arrives from outside one’s intentions. The intrigue of this exhibition does not lie in explaining that difference, but in showing how that difference is transformed into matter, scent, sound, and light within an actual building.

Vacancy is often interpreted as a temporarily paused state of real estate—when the previous tenant has left and the next one has not yet arrived. But in this exhibition, a vacant space is not a neutral, empty room. The previous functions of the space—as an office, pantry, or lounge—may have disappeared, but the habits of the space remain. The white walls, exposed ceiling, windows, stairs, storage cabinets, and basement corridors do not merely serve as backgrounds for the artworks; they become forces that repel and capture the works. Rather than simply coming to see the artworks, visitors pass through the lingering sensations of the building itself.

Lee Yeonjin's gauze creates the first scene of this passage. The artist treats the translucent gauze like the surface of a painting, yet does not confine it within a canvas. The lines of gauze stretching across the building’s exterior and interior are soft and fragile. Yet this very fragility highlights the solidity of the architecture. Within a space supported by cement, steel, brick, and ducts, the gauze hangs, is tied, relies on, and briefly stays. When painting detaches from the wall and leans against the building's body, the work becomes not a 'picture' but a mode of occupation.

Exhibition view of the vacant space project exhibition 'find and found'. Vacant Space Project

Son Baeyoung looks closer to the ground. His focus is on plastic bags drifting through the city and the places where those bags briefly settle. The sand texts, photographs, and observation boards scattered throughout the vacant space do not define discarded objects as mere waste. Plastic bags passing by street corners, under stairs, beside walls, and in parking lot corners are not insignificant urban debris, but instead become temporary beings where movement and stillness, wind and surface, management and neglect converge. Son Baeyoung’s work is small and slow. Yet, it is precisely this slowness that allows us to see what the city sweeps away too quickly.

Hong Darin’s 'Anxiety Line' most directly evokes bodily emotions in this exhibition. The tangled structure of scrap materials, ropes, hoses, lumber, and wires does not explain anxiety, but gives it form. Here, anxiety does not remain as an internal psychological state. Instead, it crawls along the floor, leans against the wall, casts shadows, and claims a corner of the space. Particularly, the way in which leftover wires from the vacant space are incorporated transforms this work from a personal confession into a site-specific structure. The 'line' the artist refers to is a sense of connection that rejects classification as mere points. In this exhibition, the line is persistent rather than beautiful, and more intent on survival than on orderliness.

The fourth floor, curated by Bae Yunjae, is more akin to a laboratory. Objects such as laser levels, mirrors, magnifying glasses, dehumidifiers, glass tanks, filters, and thermal cameras are more reminiscent of an equipment storage or temporary research lab than an art museum. However, Bae Yunjae’s work draws invisible conditions—light, humidity, heat, dust—out onto the surface of perception through these non-art objects. In this space, visitors become more conscious of what becomes visible than of what they actually see. Vision is no longer just a matter of the eyes; it becomes a complex event involving humidity, reflection, temperature, and angles of light.

Younghwan Kwon, Belle Epoque_snowing, 2025, Video 5_07min, Chamber, Seoul. Hole-punched clips found on restored hard disks. Vacant Project

Kwon Younghwan traverses the various floors of the exhibition, most persistently engaging with the time of vacancy. Temporary walls and chunks of paint from past exhibitions, dried coffee cups, objects found inside and outside the vacant building, strands of hair, soap fragments, photographs of empty houses, and deodorant are loosely repeated across different floors rather than organized into a single body of work. For Kwon Younghwan, vacancy is more a state than a place. Traces of past use, the possibilities of future use not yet arrived, and a temporarily permitted present during the exhibition period all overlap. Of particular interest is 'White Noise' on the fifth floor. The scent masquerading as cleanliness erases human traces while simultaneously evoking the memory that someone was there. Scent most immediately betrays the emptiness of a room.

In the basement, Jeon Hyungbae and Geum Jisoo shift the exhibition’s focus from vision to sound. 'Nest' transforms the underground space into a site of vibration through metal structures, subwoofers, exciter speakers, amplifiers, and more. Here, sound is not background music. Rather, it is the density and form of the city’s remnants conveyed physically to the body. Instead of viewing the work head-on, visitors feel the pressure of sound as they move through the corridor. In that the final sensation of the exhibition lingers on the body rather than the eyes, this basement installation most simply and powerfully anchors the physicality of the vacant space.

The strength of this exhibition lies in not presenting the six artists’ works as a 'showcase of emerging artists.' Each floor is an independent room, yet also connects as a device for a different sense. The sand and gauze on the first floor, the wires and anxiety on the second, observation and debris on the third, light and humidity on the fourth, scent on the fifth, and vibration in the basement together turn the vacancy into a single vertical promenade. Although the visitor’s path moves up and down, the process is more akin to translating what the city has left behind into ever-different senses.

Jeon Hyungbae and Geum Jisoo, Nest, 2026. Vacancy Project

However, at times, the exhibition’s concept gets ahead of itself in its explicitness. The framework of 'searching' and 'finding' is clear, but some works become more powerful when they move beyond the boundaries of that explanation. The most convincing moments in this exhibition are not found in the sentences of the artist notes, but rather in the shadow of a wire in a dark room, the unfamiliar equipment placed in the center of a bright office, the low vibration shaking a basement corridor, and the artificial scent lingering in an empty room touching the body of the visitor first. When space operates before words, 'find and found' becomes not a curatorial theme but an experience.

Ultimately, this exhibition does not end with transforming a vacant space into a gallery. More importantly, it compels us to see vacancy as vacancy once again. An empty room is not a room with nothing in it. Even after people have left, objects remain, scents linger, light enters at changing angles, and sound travels along the walls and floors. The city constantly builds new structures and erases old traces. Yet, contemporary art sometimes briefly enters the cracks of that erasure to rearrange the sense of ownership over sensations thought to have disappeared. What 'find and found' uncovers is, before any artwork, the inadequacy of the notion of emptiness itself. The exhibition runs until June 14.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.