Poster image of 《Las Ruinas Circulares 1》 © Schema Art Museum

《Las Ruinas Circulares》 was conceived as an exhibition introducing artists who are developing distinctive worldviews of their own amid the sweeping currents of Modernism and Postmodernism.

Drawing in hybridized forms from such sources as art history, subculture, mythology, and philosophy, these artists construct new worlds of their own. At times, they resemble genre fiction writers; at others, bards reinventing mythology. Sometimes, enclosed within their own universes and inhabiting worlds entirely of their own making, they even project a certain nerd-like sensibility.

This exhibition focuses on the ways in which these artists build their own narrative worlds. Whether intentional or not, such narrativity carries particular significance in the present moment. In contrast to the modernist world from which narrative was excluded, today we see widespread enthusiasm for quasi-mythological subcultures.

In an era when the narratives of Disney’s Marvel franchise, fashion, and even individual artists are consumed as content, the power of narrative is felt almost instinctively. The exhibition seeks to select and draw attention to artists who confidently construct their own narrative worlds—worlds that may, in some sense, be understood as anti-modernist.

Installation view of 《Las Ruinas Circulares 1》 © Schema Art Museum

The exhibition title 《Las Ruinas Circulares》 is taken from a short story in Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones. In the story, an unknown man dreams and, within that dream, longs for and creates a son. Dwelling among circular ruins, the man receives the power of an unknown god and brings his son—the dream—into physical existence.

He later causes the son to forget that he was born as an apparition within a dream. In the end, however, the man himself realizes that he, too, is the child of another dream—an apparition—and the story comes to a close.

A simple recounting of the plot may not be enough to convey the richness of its imagery or the concept and structure of the dream. Here, the dream encompasses longing, illusion, and reality all at once. Perhaps he—the magician—can be understood as one who dreams, one who creates a world through dreaming, an unknowable god, a being who is himself an illusion, and a figure that is physical yet somehow not. Could he, then, have been an artist?

Jaehong Ahn, Reconciliation of the Three Tyrants, 2023-2024, Oil on canvas, 250 x 190 cm © Jaehong Ahn

Artists often mold clay in order to realize their aspirations and dreams. They create imperfect Adams and Eves, dream of them, and imagine and construct the grounds upon which they might live. At the origins of art, perhaps there has always been such a physical experimentation with dreams and illusions.

In the postmodern era, when the zeitgeist that must be newly shattered has disappeared, perhaps the essence of creation closest to these origins lies in dreams and aspirations. The aim of this exhibition is to ask: What does our era dream of, and what does it seek to experiment with materially?

It is intriguing to consider what kinds of worlds are being created by artists who repeatedly dream anew through enigmatic symbols, material clues, and fragments of forms, gradually constructing worlds of their own; how each of these “circular ruins”—the artists’ individual worlds—might connect with one another; or whether they might remain as separate, unconnected continents.

From this perspective, Schema Art Museum seeks to offer a glimpse into the worlds of artists who create realities of their own or experiment through acts of dreaming. In Part I of 《Las Ruinas Circulares》, the exhibition presents the worlds of Kim Yun Seob, Jaehong Ahn, Kang Cheol Gyu, and Jiieh G Hur.

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