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Today, we live amidst a ceaseless flood of images, information, objects, and events. The new continually emerges, yet most of it is consumed and forgotten before it can form meaningful relations. At a time when emergence itself has become excessive, it is all the more important to ask what becomes perceptible to us, and how.
Modes of Emergence examines how forms and relations emerge through the intersection of different materials, actions, temporalities, and environments. Here, emergence is not the sudden appearance of a completed form. Rather, it is a state that gradually takes shape through ongoing processes of repetition and accumulation, generation and transformation, constraint and adjustment. In the works of Fanhee Lee, Ria Choi, and Sunah Choi, form does not advance toward a single predetermined destination. By revisiting past practices, the three artists bring forward elements accumulated over time through repetition and reconfigure them into new relations, each in their own way.
Fanhee Lee treats the process of painting as a game. Following a self-defined protocol, he tests the possibilities of painting by revisiting forms developed in earlier works, varying their scale, position, density, and movement before placing them in new contexts. HIs paintings share a vocabulary of colors and formal elements rendered in oil, pencil and colored pencil, while recurring motifs serve as links between one work and another. Repetition here does not reproduce the same. Instead, it introduces difference into earlier forms, allowing them to develop into other states. In Shabu-Shabu-Shabu , Goon , and Rappel , all painted in 2023, architectural structures suggestive of monuments and diagrammatic signs appear closely with one another. Within the canvases, straight and curved lines, horizontal and vertical elements, and empty spaces and the structures surrounding them are continually rearranged. Through overpainting and erasure, layering and fragmentation, these familiar architectural signs shed their specific referents and become mutable structures that both establish boundaries and generate new spaces within them.
This method of moving and varying forms within a given protocol extends to Lee’s process of titling his works. For the artist, a title is not a device for assigning meaning to a work or explaining its content, but another game of finding sounds and rhythms that suit its form. He collects words according to the sensory impressions produced by their sound, pronunciation, and rhythm. Sometimes he matches one of these words to a completed work; at other times, he takes a title chosen in advance as the point of departure for developing a work. The title thus becomes a formal element in its own right, a choice that constitutes the work alongside its visual form. This attitude, which leaves form and language open to sensation and choice rather than binding them to particular meanings, aligns with Lee’s view of painting not as a fixed outcome but as a process of continual renewal.
Ria Choi examines how structures come into being through forces that arise between material, space, and the body. She carefully arranges her paper sculptures in response to spatial conditions and the movement of the body, generating new tensions among material, structure, and the body. The artist builds up multiple glossy coatings on fragile paper to alter its surface texture and give it strength, then cuts, tears, coils, and connects it to structures held together by mutually supporting forces. With their subtle silver sheen, the sculptures shift among clustered masses, precariously balanced structures, and loosely sagging forms. They occupy a liminal and fluid state, as though still hardening or yet to settle into a final form. This material experimentation also extends to transforming familiar forms into other states.
Melting Pillow (2026) began with the artist imagining what the moment of falling asleep might look like if it could be captured. The pillow-like sculpture retains the outline of something soft and comforting, yet appears to hover above the floor, bringing its familiar form into tension with the strangeness of its gleaming surface. Although it holds a fixed shape, it also seems to be slowly flowing downward under the pull of gravity. This tension reflects Choi’s approach to expanding the boundaries of sculptural possibility through her act of working with materials. head stand (2026) begins with a consideration of the body’s axis. An axis provides a reference by which the position, direction, and movement of an object can be gauged, while a headstand overturns the familiar order of above and below. Made by covering metal pipes with a mixture of paper and clay, the structure shifts between verticality and inclination. Its components lean against and cross one another, holding a somewhat precarious balance. This instability presents form not as something fixed, but as a state under continuous adjustment. By negotiating the relationship between material properties and force, Choi tests the conditions required for a form to hold and the moments when those conditions begin to falter.
By contrast, Sunah Choi allows her work to take shape through sustained engagement with materials, following the minute judgments and decisions that arise along the way. She closely observes the properties of each material and adjusts her actions in response. Her work is particularly receptive to shifts in material conditions brought about by the weather and the surrounding environment, with its forms adjusted in response to unpredictable changes. Rather than realizing a predetermined form, her process involves an ongoing exchange between the material’s responses and her own perception, keeping form open to circumstances as they change.
Air Con (2026) began with the sensation the artist experienced upon entering an interior filled with cool air on a summer day. She regards the entire interior of the building as a single large sculpture and treats the air-conditioned area as its inner space, layering sharply cut panes of glass against the inside of the gallery windows. As the transparent panes overlap, they produce a subtle green tint that suggests invisible currents of air and the points at which they intersect. Rather than presenting a specific form, the work evokes sensations of light and temperature, inside and outside, directing attention to space itself as a sensory experience. The artist does not use material to represent an environment. Instead, she draws the surrounding conditions into the work and adjusts how form becomes perceptible within a changing environment. In Sculpey (2026), this relationship becomes more tangible through light and shadow. Choi spreads Sculpey, a modeling material that can be shaped by hand, into thin sheets and affixes them to the surface of the glass. As natural light passes through the glass during the day and interior light spills outward at night, the work produces different surfaces and shadows according to the direction and intensity of the light. The same material and structure are thus perceived differently as time and light change.
Each of the three artists opens form toward what comes next in a different way. Fanhee Lee recombines existing elements through rules and variation; Ria Choi reveals the mutability of structure where force and balance intersect; and Sunah Choi adjusts the boundaries of form in response to material and environment. In their works, one choice leads to another, while existing conditions are altered once again through subsequent changes. Rather than progressing toward predetermined outcomes, the works gradually assume different configurations through the push and pull of material and action, space and perception. Modes of Emergence attends to this very movement: the moment when what remains undecided briefly takes form before opening once again onto another state.
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