Installation view of 《Non-World》 (WWNN, 2025) © Woongcheol Lee

The solo exhibition 《Non-World》 by artist Woongcheol Lee, selected for the Arts Council Korea’s Interdisciplinary Arts Creation Incubator, has opened. Through his works, Lee has visualized invisible layers of sensation and perception, exploring the boundaries between reality and virtuality, life and non-life, and nature and culture.

In this exhibition, the artist seeks to break away from perspectives and orders constructed around humans. Starting from imagining a post-human world brought about by the climate crisis and environmental destruction, he explores how the absence of humans can become a condition for a new order and possibility, rather than mere extinction.

However, 《Non-World》 does not simply imagine post-human time as catastrophic; instead, it confronts the current crisis while simultaneously looking beyond it. The exhibition presents experimental works utilizing various media—including sculpture, installation, ceramics, video, and sound—that reflect on the possibilities of non-human sensations and relationships.

Visitors are invited to become beings who sense and contemplate the world for themselves, and through the medium of art, they will experience both sensory reflection on a changing world and unknown possibilities.

Artist Woongcheol Lee's solo exhibition, 《Non-World》 , will be held at WWNN, an exhibition space located in Samcheong-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul . The exhibition was co-curated by artist Woongcheol Lee and independent curator Lee Sang-mi. 《Non-World》 is an exhibition that experimentally imagines non-human relationships and diverse modes of existence that can persist even after humans disappear.

Set against the backdrop of an uncertain future brought about by anthropocentric thinking, the climate crisis, and environmental destruction, the exhibition asks, "If humans were to vanish from the Earth, what form would the world take?" However, rather than simply imagining the world after humans disappear in an apocalyptic sense, the exhibition reflects on the current crisis while seeking both new possibilities and responsibilities.

Installation view of 《Non-World》 (WWNN, 2025) © Woongcheol Lee

《Non-World》 introduces new works—including sculpture, installation, ceramics, video, and sound—that question familiar sensory systems and methods of assigning meaning.  Tower references and deconstructs sculptor Constantin Brancusi's masterpiece Endless Column, reconstructing it into a new structure. This sculpture visualizes the imagination that a man-made monument could lose its original function over time and transform into a habitat or play space for other life forms.

Replay is a 20-minute sound piece produced on LP in collaboration with sound artist Suh Hye-min. Suh Hye-min handled the sound design and editing, using underwater sounds and everyday mechanical noises collected by the artist as material. By mixing dolphin sounds, electronic sounds, and LP noise, the work deconstructs existing musical order and prompts the viewer to imagine how non-human beings might perceive these sounds.

Coordinates(2025) is a ceramic work created by 3D scanning a human face, engraving it in the form of coordinates onto a clay tablet, and then firing it in a high-temperature kiln. Combining technology and primitivism, this work functions as a visual message conveying traces of humanity to future higher beings, while simultaneously serving as an incomplete record that cannot be interpreted.

Terra Nova is an installation piece in which corn plants are planted inside a rectangular structure surrounded by mirrors, allowing the viewer to observe their growth process. This artificial ecosystem explores the possibilities of human survival and ecological networks, dismantling the boundaries of time and space through a visual effect that appears to expand infinitely.

Through these works, artist Woongcheol Lee explores the reconstruction of senses beyond a human-centered order and the new possibilities of existence revealed in that process. The exhibition space is composed of an open structure that does not impose a specific interpretation, but rather encourages viewers to re-sensory and contemplate the world for themselves.

This is an attempt to transform the exhibition from a one-way delivery of messages into a forum for active reflection in which the audience participates. Through this exhibition, the audience will have the opportunity to break away from human-centered thinking and contemplate new senses and modes of existence through the medium of art.

Woongcheol Lee's solo exhibition 《Non-World》 is formed under the condition of the "absent sensory subject. " Rather than declaring the extinction of humanity, it unfolds by questioning the possibilities of a world that will continue in ways unknown to us. By imagining a world where humans are absent, we finally confront human vulnerability, and the creative potential manifested from that vulnerability opens up the possibility for a new emergence.

The artworks, each emitting light in its own way, prepare for new possibilities and expansions upon a structure deviating from the center. They also simulate an unfamiliar future created by unpredictable order, unrecognized residue, and undefined contacts. Deconstructing the existing center is not destruction, but rather the act of opening a pathway to the possibility of self-reorganization.

Passing through this intangible pathway, the viewer confronts the strange continuity of the world and becomes an active subject sensing an indeterminate future. Disappearance is not an end but a condition for transition, and debris is not useless but becomes a medium capable of generating a new order .

– Lee Sang-mi (Independent Curator)

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