DOOSAN ART LAB is a program that DOOSAN Art Center has been presenting since 2010 to discover and support emerging practitioners in the fields of visual and performing arts. In the visual field, five under-35 artists have been selected on a competitive basis to have their work presented in a group exhibition format. DOOSAN ART LAB Exhibition 2026 features the artists selected through last year’s open call: Rim Park, Jiu Song, Jeongmin Oh, Lee Dong-hyun, and Ridane Lee.

The five artists featured in the exhibition do not simply accept the world as a single preordained structure. Using their individual strengths and sensibilities as a starting point, they construct their own places here through different media and narratives. Those places are both the traces formed over the course of memory and time, as well as a place of fracturing that arises through misalignment with the world. In their displaced positions, the artists sense a curious serenity, shifting their dwelling to the innermost realm of the body’s interior or shaking up normalcy within states that are defined as “false.” The worlds constructed in the process permeate into the cracks of a robust order, grudally increasing the share that is their own.

Rim Park begins her process by visiting places that deviate from our human systems of usage and management. Physically passing through spaces where long periods of neglect have loosened control, she turns the images, remaining substances, and traces that she witnesses there into points of departure. What Park mainly encounters on her surveys is silent organic matter that has survived in long-neglected environments, existing in forms that are frayed and dried. The artist transports them to her studio, where she casts them or turns them into frames for her work, transforming the observed surfaces into the skin of sculpture and print. Yet it remains nearly impossible to faithfully represent the romantic state formed through the layering of nature, time, and happenstance. To Park, a “romantic state” is an aggregate of unstable and unpredictable conditions that can never be reached through human understanding or planning. Aware of this distance, she nonetheless holds on to her yearning for the object in a repeated process of imitation and failure.

With this exhibition, the ruined landscapes that Rim Park encountered on her site visits are summoned into the gallery. Rather than undergoing complete annihilation, structures that were raised through some past act of human will gradually lose their original order and function as they crumble and oxidize in the layers of time. Yet even in those moments when everything seems to have ended, the changes in what remains continue. Where a once-robust form has broken down, matter refuses to converge on a fixed state—wavering in response to time, events, and unexpected interventions. They said they would leave (2025), an installation positioned low on the floor, begins to gradually awaken as the viewer approaches. The tangled sounds that drift through the air ripple along the metal pipes that lead outside; the house becomes an instrument that simultaneously plays the sounds of the past and present, of this place and that one. The remaining structure no longer operates as a suspended trace but as a situation. Anxiety is a habit (2025), a print hung beyond the house, shows a single paper where the form of a functioning human body is juxtaposed with its extinguished form. As bodies from different times linger in the empty structure, the setting becomes a place where the timeframes of past existence can be perceived.

Park’s ruins exist not as suspended scenes but as processes that continue through the permeation of events from different times. Here, there is no longer any distinction of “before” and “after.” In this tangled structure, the viewer imagines both what they never witnessed at the beginning and what remains until the end. Observing how presences outside of human-centered time persist through their own rhythms, the artist continues striding into a timeframe of ruins—one that never stops for a second.

Jiu Song works according to the subtle sensations and billowing dream images that she senses while lingering inside the objects and spaces around her. She does not set boundaries in terms of media such as drawing, sculpture, or writing, allowing her hands instead to move and find the best-suited approach. The items used in her work are the most ordinary things—the objects that attach themselves to her over the course of life, crumbled fragments, materials bought at some indeterminate time, filtering light. Instead of being represented exactly as they are, they appear in dreamlike forms layered with memories and perceptions as they pass through the artist’s experience and body. Song does not decide ahead of time what she will preserve and discard—her experience is one of accumulating, paring down, cutting out, and quietly observing according to her emotions and memories. What remains at the end of this repeated process of choice and deferral are tiny seeds of perception that are mild yet clear, as creations that have already passed through their own moments converge alongside one another at a certain point to form a single scene.

The artist’s work here originated in a memory of being plagued by nightmares. Song was given a small Raphael statue, which she placed by her bedside when she went to sleep. In the Bible, the archangel Raphael appears as a healer who is always with human beings, providing a healing hand to someone. The image of one side-by-side with another conjures associations of the relationship that arises between them. Occupying a space by the is What to keep (to keep) what to let go (let go) was it let go (was it) (2026), which adopts a flow in which these relationships connect with different forms and distances. A table that mistakenly arrived with only three legs creates a sustainable structure as it comes together with the story of Atlas holding up the world. The red and blue colors of cherry pits evoke the blues of the sky just before sunrise. The lemon-yellow sunset that Song observed through her every day overlaps with the colors of chamomile reflected in a thin needle in a story she once read. The face of the angel at the right edge beholds all the stories taking place to the left. Each fragment resonates like a chorus all around, as if to say that if something exists here on a theater stage, it is also present over “there.” Inside the gallery, a languid light is cast as a stop motion video of the sunlight that poured into the artist’s studio every afternoon seeps out between the fabric. The sound of an apple being peeled—evoking the movements of the artist’s hands as she cut out the sun’s shape—combines with the wooden workspace and marks of the tools used to fix her sculptures in place. These represent the accumulation of the hand’s labors, showing them to be another story of  creation.

Jeongmin Oh uses the language of painting to visualize perceptions that arise within the body. Her paintings begin with observations of the internal changes encountered after being suddenly struck by a disease one day. Such observations require an imagination that transcends the visible, audible, tangible senses of the visible world. A low heat that warms the body, entangled arrangements of repeated contracting and relaxing, the high-amplitude throbbing created by the creation and destruction of cells—the events that disease presides over within the body are transformed into a variable landscape through the juxtaposition of deliberate gestures with seemingly random material encounters.

In her new works, Oh recalibrates her sense of distance vis-à-vis her own body through movements of “spreading” and “entering.” In Not Settling (2025), brushstrokes of unclear sequence harden into translucency on a canvas that far exceeds human scale, mixing with a surface-sealing wax to form a translucent veil. The curious sense of a constant rippling of things beyond our will in the most intimate of settings—the body—leads us to transcend the boundaries of the body and imagine an interior that is greater than its exterior. Things that once grew deep inside us bind each other to form a new mass that is larger than ourselves. In Passing Through Overlapping Places (2025), what stands out is a gesture of tilting the body once again to pierce the envelope and reach a place deeper inward. Taking a step further toward the center of these layered sensations, the artist confronts the inside head on. The traces here resemble a skin where vibration, eruption, disintegration, and tangling occur over and over underneath the surface, vividly revealing a condensed state through the rhythms of the different movements and the layers of color on the surface.

In this way, Jeongmin Oh’s paintings flow endlessly with internal movements of the body that can never be fully understood or controlled. The artist briefly summons onto the canvas things that cannot be seen or touched, creating a place where an incomplete body can be externalized. Sensations, substance, chance, and presentiment intersect here to expand into a single sensory field.

Lee Dong-hyun invokes the memories and desires inscribed deep inside the body, exploring ways of connecting with the outside through the linking structures of a body that traverses the boundary between inside and outside. Memories that are private, shameful, and pleasurable are discharged through viscera and orifices, while the traces of others flow inside to mingle with what lies within us. The artist happened to witness the image of smoke and wastewater being discharged from a building’s pipes, which were located in its less visible areas. Here, he sensed the long, unseen connections that operate like a single body. In a landscape where substances originating in different places move along the pipe and mix until the source can no longer be determined, the artist’s secret desire for connection with others is expanded through the tubular structure.

For this exhibition, Lee presents sculpture installation and video work inspired by those connective structures. Two capsule devices, one built for ignition and the other for discharge, are linked together like viscera. Intangible smoke is amassed as proof of that connection. The narrow ignition port, which can only be accessed by squeezing oneself inside, calls to mind a prison, evoking the sense of mutual barbarism in a sealed environment that oppresses the body. The artist juxtaposes the structure with the image of a prison cell described in Son Chang-sop’s “The Human Zoo” (1955). That story, which is set in a confined space where around a dozen human beings are being held in captivity, offers a stark portrait of the violent order and self-serving impulses formed within. Perspectives exchanged across a small —which serves as the only connection between the cell’s interior and exterior—are linked to the flows between the ignition port (which traps evidence) and the outlet port (which discharges it). The movement through the pipeline’s openings visualizes dynamics of interior and exterior, activity and passivity, violation and acquiescence.

Lee also establishes a confessional space for the “Chief Clerk,” a key character who represents the second-ranked figure in the cell in the story’s hierarchy. While he may appear to be a predator who freely indulges his primal instincts, he is also someone who submits thoroughly to the logic of power and is ultimately unable to obtain anything he truly wants. In his character, the artist observes that these twisted desires are by no means exclusive to the “other.” In The love letter from the Chief Clerk (2026), the perspective of the other observing events from outside is intertwined with the perspective of the one actually experiencing the urges and perceptions inside. After completing a long and repetitive act of cleaning, tightening, and connecting his device, the artist shoves his body inside a capsule that slowly inhales and exhales. The interior, which is cloaked in a skin of pink marks left by smoke bombs, also resembles a secret nest where the external rules have been suspended. Inside, he screams, cries, and laughs, delivering a confession that resembles a monologue. Inside the hermetic space, desultory sincerity slowly layers with primal desires that always seep out despite the efforts to conceal them.

Ridane Lee observes the stereotyped images of women that appear repeatedly in contemporary media, while bringing them into collision with the subtle emotions harbored within the environments they occupy. The figures in her videos—created with tools that range from live action to 2D animation and generative AI—perform a kind of extreme femininity with their colorful makeup and exaggerated gestures. They seem at first glance to reinforce conventional perspectives, but they also deconstruct themselves with the internal fissures they generate.

Lee takes aim at a contemporary consumer culture where everything is produced and consumed rapidly. In the process, she shows which objects are circulated and what desires inform them. In her new work Wreckers (2026), she juxtaposes automobiles and women—two subjects at the apex of the contemporary capitalist consumer aesthetic. A mutual reflection and similarity is observed between the fate of the automobile, broken down part by part and consumed without waste even after it has lived out its useful life,  and the ways in which women are consistently objectified, broken down, and circulated in pixel units. The video interprets the perspective of a driver on the road with a voyeuristic gaze that observes and consumes women, as well as the dry gaze of a closed-circuit camera. The women created by the implicit rules of media—including game characters, models, and pin-up girls—ruminate on the hollow destiny conferred to them and, as if to mock it, begin climbing on or smashing the cars. The technical flaws and mistakes that periodically pop off the screen connect with the violent energy of the car disposal sequence, introducing new elements of dynamism and fracturing. Junky Dates (2026) uses metal plates to transcribe data for a female driver, mapped in such a way that the car’s violent movements leave the form unidentifiable, and combines them with waste car parts such as a muffler and dash cam. In the process, it shows how the images in the video—fated to be consumed and used up—linger like debris and transform. Entangled with the circuits of the gaze, technology, and capital, the images are reconfigured as they break away from the established order in fragmented form.

The five artists in the exhibition do not strive to overly broaden their scope or speak on behalf of others. Instead, they establish faint linkages with the outside through their ongoing efforts to observe and examine their own boundaries. The things we want to do often manifest as a language of will, whereas the things we are capable of doing and the things we should not do tend to emerge quietly amid a relationship with their conditions. This is realized through thoughtful and honest choices—like maintaining a balance on our tiptoes as we carefully observe our surroundings, attentive to unstable transformations.

Rim Park (b. 1998) is based in Seoul, working in sculpture, installation, and printmaking. She has held solo exhibitions at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler (2025, Berlin, DE), LDK (2024, Seoul, KR), and CYLINDER ONE (2023, Seoul, KR). She has participated in group exhibitions at Primary Practice (2025, Seoul, KR), CYLINDER TWO (2025, Seoul, KR), Salon Hannam (2024, Seoul, KR), ThisWeekendRoom (2023, Seoul, KR), among others.

Jiu Song (b. 1996) is based in Seoul working in sculpture, drawing, and installation. She held a solo exhibition at Project Space Sarubia (2024, Seoul, KR). Song has participated in group exhibitions at YPC SPACE (2025, Seoul, KR), HITE Collection (2024, Seoul, KR), Pipe Gallery (2023, Seoul, KR), Spaceuooyoung (2022, Seoul, KR), among others. She was a resident artist at K-ARTS Creative Studio in 2025.

Jeongmin Oh (b. 1994) is a Seoul-based painter. She held a solo exhibition at DIVE Seoul (2022, Seoul, KR) and has participated in group exhibitions at PCO (2025, Seoul, KR), Hwanggeumhyang (2024, Seoul, KR), Museumhead (2023, Seoul, KR), Space Cadalog (2023, Seoul, KR), Gallery IN (2022, Seoul, KR).

Lee Dong-hyun (b. 1993) is based in Seoul working across drawing, performance, sculpture, and video. He has held solo exhibitions at Xlarge Gallery (2025, Seoul, KR) and Space Cadalog (2024, Seoul, KR). Lee has participated in group exhibitions at SAPY (2025, Seoul, KR), Frieze House Seoul (2025, Seoul, KR), and Suchi (2024, Seoul, KR). He has also presented a performance at Interim (2024, Seoul, KR).

Ridane Lee (b. 1996) is based in Seoul, working in sculpture and video. She has held solo exhibitions at Gasamrojieul (2021, Seoul, KR), and Artspace HYEONG (2019, Seoul, KR). She presented a solo screening at LDK (2024, Seoul, KR). She has also participated in group exhibitions at LDK.DT (2025, Seoul, KR), Art For Lab (2024, Anyang, KR), Seoul National University Museum of Art (2024, Seoul, KR), CR Collective (2024, Seoul, KR), and WHITE NOISE (2024, Seoul, KR).

Tuesday-Saturday 11:00~19:00 / Closed on Sunday, Monday, Lunar New Year holidays
DOOSAN Gallery: 15, Jongno 33-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea
Tel. 02-708-5050