At the core of this exhibition lies an exploration of materiality, imagery, and textuality within contemporary urban structures and societies. Between Vienna and Seoul, Chung and Hofer open up a multilayered dialogue that transcends personal experiences and geographic distances. Through her paintings based on canvas, Heemin Chung questions the process of understanding the images she is faced with today. Moving between digital and physical realms, her work intervenes in the unfolding of materiality, shaking the fragile boundary between understanding and misunderstanding that hovers between what is seen and what is experienced. During his long walks through Seoul, Siggi Hofer absorbed the city’s many layers and shades. From these impressions, he created new loop and text-based works using rolls of tracing paper, which are condensed into layered compositions – a visual echo of his exploration.

What connects the two artists is an alternative perspective that explores the possibility of dialogue generated at the points of boundary and division. Traversing different cities, and moving between the material and immaterial, memory and experience, their practices delicately capture the subtle vibrations and frictions that emerge from social boundaries and separations. At the intersection of these two cities and the two artists, the exhibition regards the traces and resonances left within the spaces of separation and distance as part of an ongoing process of creation. It unfolds new grounds for dialogue through subtle shifts and variations that move across social, cultural, and urban boundaries.

* This exhibition is supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport (BMWKMS).

Heemin Chung (b. 1987)
Seoul based artist Heemin Chung (b. 1987) in her artworks explores the sensorial impact of transitional states between images and materials, and between the digital and the real, within a rapidly changing world. The interplay between the physical and the virtual, the felt and the replicated, the seen and the unseen is central to Chung’s work. Through diverse material experiments, Chung’s work focuses on the loss of information and matter that occurs between three-dimensional forms and their translation into two-dimensional data, exploring the gap between technologically mediated realities and the physical world. 

Siggi Hofer (b. 1970)
Vienna based artist Siggi Hofer (b. 1970), part of the Austrian AiR program Seoul, hosted by SCA, questions the universality and conventions of signs embedded in images and texts. By exposing contradictions within integrated systems of meaning, his work develops alternative potentials for individual symbols. Through diverse media—drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and text— Hofer reorganizes spatial and temporal contexts, emphasizing the slippages and fractures that persist in conventional modes of communication. His work gestures toward alternative communication that exists within visual perception.