The sounds of spring in South Korea are not only heard, but felt—echoing in gentle rain, the warmth of returning light, the quiet stir of dormant rice fields, and the rising curl of smoke from a wood-fired kiln.
Sounds of Spring is a sensory-led exhibition that reflects on the quiet transitions of the season, presenting contemporary Korean artworks in conversation with antique furniture. Together, they form a poetic narrative of renewal—tracing spring’s ephemeral gestures through the tactile languages of clay, textile, wood, and fire.
The exhibition brings together four artists whose practices are grounded in materiality and process, capturing the nuanced moods and movements of spring. Each work invites the viewer to tune into intimate dialogues between nature and form, silence and sound, presence and memory.
Kwak Hye-young
Kwak’s abstract ceramic practice centres on the ephemeral. Her works are meditations on sound as a fleeting trace of existence—echoes that might otherwise be lost to time. In Seeing the Sound of Rain in Spring & Summer in Seoul(2018–19), porcelain boards are placed beneath trees, in gardens, and on city pavements, becoming silent witnesses to rainfall, light, and weather. These pieces hold the memory of spring’s arrival—not through representation, but through the subtle residue of lived experience.
Park Sung-wook
Working from his rural studio in Korea, Park draws on traditional techniques to create contemporary works rooted in nature and heritage. Firing in a self-built wood kiln, he forms Moon Jars from buncheong stoneware, poured with expressive yet minimal gestures of white slip. Alongside his vessels, Park presents ceramic wall sculptures composed of slip-coated stoneware fragments—meticulously arranged into quiet, rhythmic compositions. His works offer a meditative reflection on material, memory, and the quiet arrival of spring.
Lee Sora
Textile artist Lee Sora offers a contemporary reimagining of Jogakbo, the traditional Korean patchwork. Drawing from her background in German literature and admiration for early modernist abstraction, Lee creates bold, geometric compositions by hand. In her Moshi series, she collects ramie fabric from across Korea—weathered, coarse, and rich in history. These natural fibres, stitched into deliberate arrangements, evoke the stillness of rice fields lying dormant at winter’s end, poised for the return of life.
Kim Min-wook
A self-taught woodturner based in Busan, Kim Min-wook has been dedicated to his practice since 2013. He was awarded the Lexus Creative Masters Award in Seoul and was a finalist in the 2022 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. Kim’s work is a quiet celebration of imperfection and impermanence. Turning aged Korean oak, he embraces decay and renewal—welcoming the traces of woodworms, weathered surfaces, and tree rings as part of each vessel’s story. His works allow nature’s imprint to shape their form, offering a contemplative encounter with time and transformation.
Image: Kwak Hye-young: Seeing the Sound of Rain: Spring and Summer in Seoul (duplicate), 2018-2020. Porcelain with mix media washed away by rain on surface. 17 x 40cm each. Courtesy the artist and gallery