Wrtten by Sunwoo Nam

Although all three works depict the same place, they each take on different forms, composed of images retrieved through searches of accounts belonging to people with different lives and histories. Our experiences and habits become filters that reveal the many layers a place contains. In an age when we often feel more cultural affinity with those who see, hear, and search for the same things as we do—rather than with our physical neighbors—what truly explains and constitutes the “self”? Or, among all the things that surround me, is there even one that has not in some way shaped who I am today?

Drawing on an identity shaped by living across diverse regions and cultures, artist Hyunha Lim presents a kind of “digital landscape painting.” These works merge the characteristics of places that have formed her life and experiences with the current reality in which place of residence no longer significantly defines identity, and with a broader, global shift in which online traces—records of visits or searches in virtual spaces—more clearly articulate individuality than physical location.

Through a hybrid approach that combines conceptual and manual processes—such as composite images with text, digital prints, hand stitching, and installation—the resulting landscapes evoke a paradox: the elements that make up the self are nothing extraordinary, and yet, like everyone else, they are extraordinary in their very ordinariness.

/ Written by Nam Sunwoo (Curator, Ilmin Museum of Art)