Fool's Spring

Promises of a better future, belief in growth and progress, and the myths surrounding community and history have repeatedly emerged and disappeared throughout time. Yet with each collapse, we continue to imagine another world. What matters is not whether such beliefs are true, but the extent to which they shape the way we organise reality. Some forms of imagination become institutions, while others become so deeply embedded that they are no longer recognised as beliefs at all. Just as countless myths and imaginaries surrounding the moon eventually led humanity there, neoliberalism has long structured everyday life through narratives of growth and success. History, perhaps, is nothing more than the continual replacement of one mythology with another.

BBK (Jongwan Jang × Junho Jang) has long explored the structures of collective belief through utopian imagination in Korean society, "invented traditions," and the ways human desire is projected onto nature. Since their first collaboration at Boan Space in 2019, the duo has developed a reciprocal practice in which each work becomes the point of departure for another. Junho Jang's sculptures generate images that unfold within Jongwan Jang's paintings, while Jongwan Jang's paintings in turn become the basis for new sculptural forms. One work becomes the surface of another, initiating an ongoing process of transformation. Although their collaboration appears intuitive, works such as Mind’s Theory (2026), with its psychedelic imagery painted onto circular wooden panels, and You Are My Sunshine (2026), where clusters of fruit-like forms are combined with watchful eyes, reveal a sustained exchange of visual language. In Far Season (2026), a carved wooden sculpture suspended over a painted image of a decapitated monument extends beyond formal collaboration, evoking shared historical memory and collective belief. Images that begin as personal intuition gradually expand into broader cultural narratives.

By contrast, Yaerim Ryu constructs situations in which stories remain possible rather than complete. Fragments of literature, fleeting encounters, and everyday memories are reassembled into unfamiliar spaces populated by anonymous figures and imagined beings. Her paintings are rendered with remarkable precision, yet resist settling into a single narrative. Instead, they invite viewers to bridge the gaps, establish relationships, and construct their own interpretations. Ryu describes this condition as "artificial neutrality": spaces that belong to no one in particular, yet remain open to everyone.

For this exhibition, Ryu presents a new body of work developed specifically for the space of sangheeut. Centred on anonymous interiors inhabited by plants and animals, these paintings no longer seek to describe a place or a story. Moving between reality and fiction, nature and the artificial, they instead draw attention to painting itself. Layers of accumulated pigment and repeated gestures record the passage of time beneath the image, making each canvas less a window onto narrative than a site where time and material quietly converge.

In ecology, a fool's spring refers to an early spell of warmth that causes plants to bud before winter has fully passed. Life begins before the season has truly changed. Likewise, even after failed futures and abandoned promises, we continue to imagine new worlds and construct new beliefs. At first, the exhibition appears to present two distinct worlds. Gradually, however, attention shifts toward the structures and temporalities that sustain them. For Ryu, this lies in the accumulated surface of painting; for BBK, in a collaborative process through which one work continually gives rise to another. Together, these different modes of accumulation form a shared landscape—one that resembles not a completed world, but the moment just before another season begins.