Image: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
A new outdoor sculpture by Hwang Hyungshin has been installed at MMCA Gwacheon as part of the museum’s ‘MMCA Gwacheon 40th Anniversary: Imaginations in Light’ project. Titled ‘Reconstructed Landscape’, the commissioned work was presented in the museum’s newsletter of July 30, 2026, and belongs to ‘Lingering Grounds’, an installation project set in the museum’s outdoor sculpture park. The anniversary programme runs from July 10, 2026 to October 31, 2027 across Circular Gallery 2, the Sculpture Park, the lobby, the third-floor bridge corridor and the auditorium, with admission at KRW 3,000, and is organised by MMCA with sponsorship from LG Electronics and the SBS Foundation and support from Moorim Paper.
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea says the anniversary project is designed to revisit the museum’s role and the ways visitors experience it, drawing on MMCA Gwacheon’s setting where nature, architecture and art coexist. Within that framework, ‘Lingering Grounds’ brings sculptures made to be sat on — by Kim Haneul, Bang Hyobeen, Im Jungjoo, Ha Jihoon and Hwang Hyungshin — into conversation with the works that already stand in the park, the natural landscape and visitors’ own bodily experience. It sits alongside two other strands of the anniversary programme: ‘Lightscape’, a collection-based installation with works by Kim Ayoung and Philippe Parreno, and ‘Afterimage’, which extends the theme through works by James Turrell and Iván Navarro, including the first public showing of a newly acquired Turrell.
Hwang’s contribution continues a body of work shaped by his long-running ‘Layered’ series, which he has developed over nearly 20 years. In the museum’s interview, he says that earlier pieces in the series grew upward into dense, opaque masses formed through the layering of materials, a method he traced back to memories of Seoul’s rapidly changing cityscape during his childhood. ‘Reconstructed Landscape’ marks a formal departure from that approach. Instead of building vertically, Hwang has arranged twelve box-shaped modules low to the ground, spreading them horizontally across the site.
The work is made of mirror polished stainless steel, and the artist uses the reflective surface to draw in the surrounding trees, sky, light, shadow and visitors. According to the museum text, the modules reflect and dissolve into the landscape, while their different angles fragment the view and prompt viewers to look at the setting in a new way. Hwang says the piece functions as a flexible medium for capturing light and nature rather than asserting the presence of material itself.
The work also has a minimal practical function. Hwang says he added a place for sitting so that viewers could linger among the sculpture, the park and the other works around it. In the museum’s presentation, that shift from vertical mass to horizontal arrangement is linked to a more open relationship between sculpture and site, one that avoids the sense of a fixed monument and instead suggests an artificial topography for looking and waiting.
The artist also describes the polished surfaces as a way of erasing the object’s boundaries, though he notes that the corners were sanded to a foggy white so the edges would not appear as hard separations between art and landscape. In the museum’s account, the sculpture is meant to let the reflected and actual environments bleed into each other as the weather and light change through the day. Hwang says the same surface can look entirely different in morning sunlight or at sunset, and that the work is intended to encourage viewers to accept those shifts without trying to define them.
MMCA’s profile of the artist notes that Hwang Hyungshin was born in 1981, studied woodworking and furniture design at Hongik University, and has shown work in Korea and abroad, including at the DMY International Design Festival in Berlin, Tokyo Designers Week, Milan Design Week and La Triennale di Milano. The museum identifies his earlier solo exhibitions as ‘Layered Series’ at Gallery Clip and LF head office in Seoul in 2021, ‘Layered Steel’ at G Gallery in 2018, and ‘Layered Series’ at G Gallery in 2016. ‘Reconstructed Landscape’ is listed with dimensions varying by module and is commissioned by MMCA.
