Heejae Lim’s works take taxidermied animals inside display cabinets as their central subject. Just as landscape painting historically emerged from humanity’s desire to overcome the fear of the forest—and ultimately to possess and conquer nature—taxidermied specimens signify a condition close to extinction. There is no reason to turn a healthy, thriving animal into a specimen. Because of the harm humans have inflicted on nature, animals as subjects often carry a melancholic undertone. Yet the theme that Lim has been immersing herself in for years is not merely about nature—it is the result of a rigorous dialogue between reality and painting.

Her work contains a strong self-awareness of painting as a medium, but it is not abstract. The represented object may not be the primary focus, but a pictorial experiment that completely ignores the object easily collapses into mere decor. For Lim, experimentation in painterly language becomes clearer through its relationship with the subject. Quickly discarding the referent often leads to conceptual emptiness or decorative superficiality. The taxidermied animals in her works once served as decorative objects, yet these fashionable ornaments have become strange indicators of the fate shared by all living things.

One work in this exhibition, Pinned, depicts birds and butterflies, suggesting that the image itself follows a logic similar to that of collected specimens. Anything removed from its original place—anything fixed in a particular moment—is already speaking of death. Animals confined in museums, zoos, or aquariums are, in a sense, already in the process of dying. This mechanism parallels that of photography, which fixes a moment as though pinning it with a needle. Anything placed within a frame becomes something dead, or something to be regarded as dead.

Even objects displayed in shop windows—goods meant for sale—are likewise products of someone’s loss or exploitation. Labor dignifies humanity, yet ever since surplus value began to be extracted, labor has also become the consumption of someone’s life energy. In contemporary society, consumption attempts to offer what labor no longer can, but this too is deceptive. The emergence of the visual consumer—the spectator—is a phenomenon of an era when commodity production began to dominate everyday life.

In The Birth of the Spectator, Vanessa Schwartz examines the origins of the spectacle-driven society: sensational mass publications of the modern era, morgues that turned daily trivialities into shocking public narratives, wax museums that broadened the origins of cinema into the larger field of visual culture, and the panorama/ diorama craze of the 1880s and 1890s. Museums and natural history collections were central spectacles of the late 19th-century metropolis.

In Lim’s work, these spectacles function as more than mere subject matter—they are tied to the visual conventions embedded in everyday culture. Schwartz argues that these spectacles attempted to establish standards of “the real” referenced by realism. Yet reality is not something that precedes representation—rather, it is an effect. She quotes Michel de Certeau: “Culture is not produced and consumed; it infiltrates.”

The author concludes that the experience of seeing—now a part of everyday life in major cities—is not merely the consumption of representational products but something formed through moments and events. From the perspective of alienation, consumers are no better off than producers. The taxidermy specimens that Heejae Lim has chosen from natural history museums are intriguing because they touch upon visual conventions that apply broadly to nature, collecting, artworks, and commodities. What underlies all of them is ultimately human desire.

To possess or enjoy something virtually, there is no real need to immobilize the object. In other words, one does not need to kill the real. Art, in its own way, is an apostle of peace. The painterly touch in Lim’s works makes it possible for infinite variations to emerge from a single subject. Although the artist has visited countless natural history museums at home and abroad and has her own list of specimens, these simply serve as cues for painting. The taxidermy subjects in the works relate both to the initial starting point and the final outcome of the painting.

The faint but persistent presence of the referent is connected to the field guides and natural specimens that gave the artist aesthetic experiences before she became a painter. Since childhood, Lim loved animal encyclopedias. The vivid images within them appeared as archetypes of life. Following them, young Lim sometimes collected insects or plants, yet she preferred the images to the real. Images, unlike reality, cannot be grasped. Nature, as an untouchable subject, relates to earlier works in which she painted natural objects from advertisements.

The child who wanted to hold a virtual image grew up to become a painter, only to realize that painting itself is an endless process. The subjects in this exhibition are “things alive within illusion” yet “situationally dead.” Focusing on images rather than nature itself, the artist becomes increasingly aware of the display glass that separates observer from object. Lim’s works pay attention not to the taxidermy specimens themselves but to the reflections of them on the display glass.

Taxidermy carries object-like properties distinct from complete images, making the painterly game far more complex. The fact that Lim was captivated by images in field guides—rather than the real—forms an important context for understanding her work. Yet the source of fascination that engrosses the observer remains ambiguous. Ambiguity may suggest fiction, trickery, or falsehood, but because it invites multiple modes of appearance, it is inherently playful. Nietzsche’s claim that illusion is preferable to truth reflects his artistic temperament. While taxidermy specimens were once weighty objects, they are rendered as light as smoke in Lim’s paintings.

Works in which the referent exists but is indistinctly presented invite questions about the relationship between truth and illusion. When the impossible and unnecessary project of perfectly reproducing the original is abandoned, illusion—that is, the play of simulacra—can begin. In The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze challenges Plato’s representational philosophy, which privileged ideal originals, and argues that simulacra are not degraded copies. They conceal a positive potential that rejects the dichotomy of original and copy, model and reproduction.

Deleuze identifies the effects of simulacra as phantasme—hallucination. He quotes Odoard’s analysis: “Simulacra are constructions that include the observer’s point of view; thus hallucination arises precisely at the point where the observer stands… The emphasis is not on the status of non-being but on this slight interval, this subtle distortion of the real shadow.” Through such hallucinations, “that which was concealed in the deepest recesses rises to the brightest place, and the old paradoxes of becoming take shape anew in youthful form.”

In contrast to representationalism, simulacra emphasize surface over depth, variation over origin, and becoming over representation. In the “representation” entry of the Dictionary of Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (edited by Joseph Childers), David Summers, following Deleuze, stresses the phantasia-like nature of simulacra. According to Summers, simulacra are “something beyond the capacity to form opinions—namely, the ability to illuminate, with the light of the soul, things absent or impossible, allowing us to present them to ourselves, remember, imagine, and dream.”

Taxidermy, as a subject, is tied to questions of perceiving nature for collectors, biologists, painters, and viewers alike. Lim unfolds this through the methods of painting. Until now, she has focused on the ‘Cabinet’ series, which explores the encounter between painting spaces; the ‘Faces’ series, which deals with the encounter between faces and gazes; and the ‘Stuffed’ series, which examines the meeting of exhibition space and painting space. The paintings in ‘Stuffed,’ the main body of this exhibition, subtly blend focal points from all three series. The work Four Antelopes in the Cabinet depicts antelopes housed inside a cabinet.

The storage unit is composed of several shelves—some showing only legs, others only torsos, while the middle shelf shows a full body. Their similar sizes and forms make them seem as though they are moving within the cabinet. This is how painting, a fundamentally still medium, expresses movement or sympathetic response. The artist paints animals, but because the original models are taxidermy specimens, they can never truly be full of life. And yet, because they bear traces of life, they are distinct from inert objects.

Although the labels bearing scientific names are not clearly readable, these beings occupy a place somewhere within a system constructed by humans. Even if legible, the scientific names—likely written in old and unfamiliar languages—would remain foreign, yet they belong to human taxonomy. In To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, Philipp Blom expands the mechanism of collecting from the private to the public, highlighting systems that apply equally to natural history museums and art museums.

He states that “from the moment we first step into a museum, we learn a system, a lesson, a taxonomy.” According to this system, arrangement itself becomes a kind of doctrine. But nature, in truth, knows neither categorization nor language, nor does it possess intention or purpose. Although nameplates appear before the animals in the works—indicating their position within a system—the artist nearly erases them. Existence and name remain estranged from each other. Despite humanity’s desire to systematize nature, nature cannot be fully contained within such structures.

The slight deviations in Lim’s painterly approach from the representational strategies of natural history museums make the subjects appear as though they possess a logic of their own. Because taxidermy aims to replicate the original organism as closely as possible, a viewer might say, “That is an antelope,” or “That is an antelope’s taxidermy,” if Lim had painted them with strict realist technique.

Modernity sought to overcome the erasure of the gap between word and thing—precisely the issue raised by Magritte and Foucault. In modern language, words do not serve as transparent windows to objects; they assert their own presence. Lim’s layered, translucent brushwork—suggesting forms and colors rather than delineating them—stands in stark contrast to the representational mode of biological field guides she studied as a child. Rather than elaborately depicting a chosen subject, the artist opts for blurring. This approach rejects the static impression of taxidermy and, paradoxically, imparts a subtle sense of liveliness.

At times, the antelopes seem to move as they merge with the partially greenish background. Yet this is merely a secondary effect of Lim’s unique painterly treatment. The frame of the antique wooden cabinet serves as a reminder that the subjects are indeed taxidermy specimens. In an era when everything is exposed by codes and systems, the old-fashioned cabinet resembles an unknown realm from which anything might emerge.

However, it is opened through the painter’s gaze, and viewers interact with what is shown through the logic of the painting. Because transparent language is not used, the subject does not fully present itself to the viewer. The antelope in the lowest shelf does not appear as it would have at birth (or Creation, for those who are religious), perhaps because of the context of taxidermy. Taxidermists exert great effort in reproducing the eyes to convey a sense of life. Apart from the black pupils that seem alive, the boundaries between the subject and background are blurred.

The uncertainty of the boundary suggests the creature’s death. A living being maintains its identity by distinguishing itself from the background. The artist does not transparently depict the taxidermy as taxidermy; instead, she expresses the dead subject through painterly means. In the second shelf, an antelope shows a line near its hind leg that looks as though an arrow has passed through it—suggesting a moment of an event that was never part of the original taxidermy. The more vividly the antelopes appear to be alive—whether in taxidermy or in painting—the more certain their death becomes.

The memento mori tradition, a reminder that all living beings will eventually die, paradoxically demanded more vivid representation. We see this in the still lifes of Baroque masters. Their successor was not so much later realism as photography. Photography, too, has been understood as a medium that contains the trace of what is now absent. As Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes observed, genres like portrait photography inherently contain signs of death. But Lim’s approach is not classical or realist; it has a strong, romantic painterly touch.

This choice is not sentimentalism or deception aimed at making the dead appear alive. Rather than staying within allegories that show the truth that all living things will eventually die, she begins with death as the fundamental premise and proceeds from there. The artist plays with traces of absence rather than confirming absence itself. By refusing to depict the object precisely and blurring its boundaries, she makes visible the various frames within which the object is represented rather than the object itself. As humanity’s domination of nature becomes more certain, nature and the human-made frame have become unified.

Humans can no longer coexist harmoniously with other living beings. The taxidermy subjects themselves are likely near-endangered species. The farther humans drift from nature, the more human systems strive to completely systematize and order nature so that it lines up neatly before them. This is the principle of every natural history museum. Philipp Blom, in  To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting , argues that such museum principles claim victory in their confrontation with death. Preservation, painting, and scholarship gain a sense of eternity by representing the present inside a museum, achieving a symbolic victory over death.

According to Blom, collected objects, like bones, have already died once but are revived in the minds of believers, collectors, and devotees. The collector gains new life even after their own life ends through the collection, and the collection becomes a fortress against death. Fear of death, he claims, fuels our desire to collect and to create immortality. In that sense, collected objects serve as mediators connecting us to something far beyond, and each collection item becomes a kind of totem.

While the artist—and we—may recognize the absurdity or pettiness of such representational systems, one must ask whether any “pure nature,” untouched by human hands, truly remains. The animals inside the cabinet starkly represent the current relationship between nature and humanity. Every time art exhausts itself under civilization, it has turned to nature for energy, but it is clear that art is not nature. This is why the cabinet is emphasized in Lim’s paintings. The painter merely expresses a mediated nature.

The situation of taxidermy inside a cabinet is even more severe and typical than staged safaris or zoos designed to approximate natural environments. In the work Stuffed Antelopes, the cabinet containing various antelope species is far more densely packed than they would ever appear in nature. Arranged for easy comparison and analysis at a glance, these beings continue to be instrumentalized even in death through such a gaze. These sacrificial creatures become monuments only through the unilateral gaze of humans.

The background behind them likely once included painted scenery representing their habitat, but the artist has blurred it even further. Such background paintings are often crudely executed landscapes that can look even more awkward than the taxidermy itself. If a living antelope were to see such a backdrop, it would surely think it had nothing to do with itself. The frame of the densely arranged taxidermy cabinet overlaps with the frame of the painting. Considering the Renaissance convention of equating the picture frame with a window opening outward, this nearly life-sized work positions the subject and viewer directly opposite each other.

As John Berger claimed in Ways of Seeing, paintings capable of precise depiction—particularly oil paintings—functioned as “visual safes” storing what was seen, reflecting the bourgeois consciousness of ownership at the time. What is represented is owned. Or to own something, it must first be represented. Most productive activity is representational. Modern art, distancing itself from representationalism, has placed itself in a disadvantaged position in communication and distribution.

Representation is linked to the rational project of mastering objects through knowledge. Yet Lim seeks interaction rather than virtual possession. The referents in the painting are not fully owned objects but ones she wishes to reach. The artist is not painting the object itself but what she sees. Instead of depicting the subject associated with the content, she paints the visual filter. She says she paints the glass surface of the display case rather than the subject itself. This is the intermediary zone between observer (or painter) and object. Acknowledging the barrier between subject and object is to acknowledge each other’s autonomy.

The subject is as essential as the painter. The cabinet can be seen as a miniature world representing nature, but the artist intentionally blurs the distance between foreground and background. Like the methods of the Impressionists who rejected classicism, depth is eliminated. The space feels compressed. In this situation where objects are pushed tightly against one another, the artist also finds an analogy to life. A world with increasingly little room becomes a superficial paradise. Her 2021 solo exhibition 《Inflatable Paradise》(Bamboo Collection) carries a subtitle that expresses the artist’s thoughts on the pressure of compressed space.

Although Lim’s primary medium, oil paint, is traditionally strong for detailed representation, she uses it in a luminous, translucent manner. The layers applied and wiped with wet tissues create a surface with many thin layers. The glass surface she is conscious of allows her to unfold space through relationships of plane to plane rather than line to line. Aligning the picture frame with the cabinet frame challenges conventions inherent in the form of painting itself.

Compared to the painterly treatment of the taxidermy subjects—with visible brushstrokes—the black cabinet frame has crisp verticals and horizontals, making it clear that it holds a pane of glass. The straight line, which does not exist in nature, becomes a device that sharply differentiates these once-natural beings—even in their taxidermy state—from nature. The belief that subject and object must be strictly separated—an epistemological boundary—dominated natural science until the modern era, and art shared this paradigm.

Taxidermy, which appears alive yet is dead, is inherently uncanny, and the artist emphasizes the boundary that supposedly separates subject and object to show that objectification is not natural but eerie. What appears is not a view beyond a window but a mirror image.The subjects become counterparts of the viewers who observe them. Before humans objectified and instrumentalized other humans, they did so to nature. An instrumental gaze implies an awareness that one might also become such an object.

Friends commented that the deer resemble the artist, which reflects the visual-psychological mechanism activated by a frame that shifts between window and mirror. In Stuffed Bison, a lone bison stands so close—its four legs fixed to the pedestal—that in the wild, it would endanger a hunter at such proximity. The angle captured by the artist is distorted by the strong overhead lighting. The arrangement of the wild animals inside the cabinet, according to classificatory systems, reveals how closely the domination of nature aligns with instrumental reason.

Animals that were once hunting targets for survival or ritual sacrifices and are now products of industrial meat production become rare specimens that testify to particular histories. The same applies to the many tribes and languages that have vanished from the earth without ever becoming specimens. Considering that painting must also think about extinction in this era of spectacle, Lim’s works resonate with multilayered symbolism.

In Stuffed Chamois and Wild Sheep, the cabinet containing antelope groups appears more natural because of the bright background imagery. The antelopes in the overlapping natural and artificial light appear in various poses. The outlines of the specimens are indistinct and merge with the background. This dissolution of boundaries is also a sign of death. Organisms return to nature as their boundaries unravel. Those that cannot return to nature, even in death, are returned through painterly treatment. Herbivores, once primary subjects of prehistoric hunters, were observed (for improved hunting) and worshipped, painted onto cave walls—using the natural contours of the cave surfaces to create vibrant depictions. This intention—to animate the animal—is not so different from the representational logic within natural history museums.

Lim’s works link back to the distant origins of the modern system represented by natural history museums. Aside from horned herbivores, the bird paintings are smaller because the subjects themselves are small and the artist paints close to life size. Works such as Stuffed Owl, Stuffed Scarlet Ibis, and Stuffed Stilt—birds set against bright backgrounds—do not strongly convey the impression of taxidermy; they appear as though the pedestal is a seat or even a nest. The bright background clarifies their boundaries, heightening the sense of life.

As the scale of the subject decreases, the signs of life and death become more ambiguous. Their glass or plastic eyes are less unnatural than those of cows or antelopes. The work Stuffed Three Corvids, depicting three crows, draws attention because the word “Corvid” still recalls what is not yet over: “Co(r)vid.” It is well known that the recent global pandemic originated in markets where live animals—used as grotesque ingredients—were densely confined.

Species that could never be so close in nature came together and produced deadly mutant viruses. Setting aside the imagination of Jurassic Park, the cabinet containing a variety of animals is possible only because they are dead. If alive, such diversity confined together would be hell for the animals and repulsive for observers—offering neither enjoyment nor scientific inquiry. Was the situation that triggered a global pandemic merely accidental and extreme?

A global world compressed by things that should never be close increases risk. Abundance and danger are two sides of the same coin. The subjects of research remain behind a safe glass barrier through which danger cannot pass, and the frame of the painting representing them maintains the same principle. Lim’s works, while painterly and rejecting the idea of painting as a transparent window, incorporate the philosophical implications of the window paradigm into a multilayered visual game through her choice of subject and method of depiction.

References

• [칼럼] 죽이지 않은 채 고정하는 회화의 방식
  [Column] A Painterly Method of Fixing Without Killing)