《Reverse Cabinet》 Exhibition Foreword
Yuli Yoon—with Tomoya Iwata
Collecting is a proposition about the world. From countless fragments to reality, it isolates the few, arranges them into a meticulous inventory, and in doing so, reshapes the very structure of the world. Only a rare few among the myriad shards of events, objects, and images are deemed worthy of entry into a collector’s ledger. The history of art has long been deeply entwined with the history of collecting. The glass vitrines of museums and the enigmatic cabinets of collectors served as devices that testified to the aesthetic consciousness of an era and as transparent stages where what is considered valuable was defined. The collection, as a whole, became an intriguing tool that paradoxically suggested a dual world where what is selected and what is excluded intersect.
《Reverse Cabinet》, the special exhibition at Kiaf SEOUL 2025, opens with a reflective inquiry into the fundamental significance of collecting and exhibiting. Now in its 24th edition, Kiaf has emerged as a dynamic platform where the principles of contemporary art converge with the forces of capital. Within this context, art is no longer simply an object of contemplation or appreciation; it is continually re-examined and redefined through the complex negotiations of creation, ownership, interpretation, and distribution. 《Reverse Cabinet》 responds to this condition by positioning collecting and display as both methodological framework and artistic strategy. The participating artists—Sunpil Don, Geumhyung Jeong, Ji Hye Yeom, Kai Oh, Kei Takemura, and Sen Takahashi—approach their practices through the conceptual lens of arbitrary collecting, developing their work in direct response to this framework. Their work articulates distinct logic of accumulation informed by personal motivations and sensibilities. At times, they subvert the authority and structure of the catalogue itself, destabilizing the solidity of conventional display and experimenting with unfamiliar modes of presentation. In other words, for these artists, the act of collecting and displaying serves as a means of rendering both the visible and the invisible dimensions of contemporary life through art, while simultaneously functioning as a creative strategy that navigates the value systems embedded within the institutional frameworks.
Sunpil Don’s practice is rooted in a sustained inquiry into the forms of modernity projected through subculture. He collects cultural byproducts—such as figures and merchandise—as a mean of tracing how the desire to collect mediates the entanglement between popular culture and fine art. His work <Portrait Fist> focuses on the stylized faces often found in animation—specifically the exaggerated, schematic expressions of Kyara (character)—to explore how much such images function as compressed representation of personal identity and affect. For Don, facial features, exaggerated styling, and distinctive vocal tones are not simply aesthetic traits, but signifying elements that transform the face into a symbolic vehicle—one that stands in for the body, but also for an individual’s fate, political orientation, and even the spirit of a cultural era.
Geumhyung Jeong’s practice critically examines the habitual relationships between humans and objects by physically conjoining her own body with machines, dolls, and everyday objects. In her collection, objects are not passive subjects of observation, but active agents that engage in tactile dialogue with the human body—animated presences that seem to operate with their own vitality. In works such as <Condition Check>, she turns to the museum storage room as a conceptual site to interrogate the institutionalized mechanisms of preservation, circulation, and ownership. While the storage room is conventionally understood as a space for maintaining and indefinitely safeguarding objects, for Jeong it becomes a porous space where the boundaries between human and object, life and the inanimate, begin to dissolve.
Ji Hye Yeom is a media artist who engages with expansive narratives—myth, science, and history—gathering fragments that she reassembles into speculative constellations. Working through video and immersive installation, she constructs alternate realities in which disparate narrative strands intersect and dissolve, reframing memory as a generative rather than merely restorative act. In <Black Sun X: Casper, Witch, and Handstanderus>, she interweaves three seemingly unrelated narratives: Casper, the endearing ghost figure from pop culture; the witch hunts that emerged during Europe’s transition to early capitalism in the wake of the Black Death; and Handstanderus, a fictional collective exploring vegetal modes of cognition. Through these entanglements, Yeom reflects on how historical catastrophes remain entangled with contemporary life. In <A Night with a Pink Dolphin>, Yeom recounts her encounter with pink dolphins in the Amazon rainforest, using it as a point of departure to unearth layered narratives—folk mythology, colonial histories, and the ways in which this enigmatic species is consumed as both ecological marvel and cultural commodity.
Kai Oh collects fleeting digital images and reconfigures them into a tactile system of photo-sculpture, amplifying the moments where image and bodily experience intersect. Her cross-disciplinary work—spanning photography, sculpture, and installation—can be seen as an expanded practice of collecting and displaying not only images but the very media conditions through which images take form. Her <Half Sticky> series, reconfigured for this exhibition, begins with fragments of nature captured via smartphone during urban walks. These images are transformed and spatially reassembled in response to the exhibition site. Here, photography moves beyond static documentation and fuses with provisional structures, forming three-dimensional image-sculptures that occupy the space like temporary hypotheses.
On the other hand, Japanese artists Kei Takemura and Sen Takahashi explore the foundational meaning of collecting and display through divergent approaches. Kei Takemura has long collected fragments of broken everyday objects, carefully stitching and wrapping them in silk thread. Her display cases preserve not the objects’ physical functions, but the traces of memory they carry—offering a tactile sense of what has been lost, suspended on the edge of forgetting. Sen Takahashi, having a background in conservation and restoration of modern and contemporary sculpture, engages with the inevitability of decay as both concept and material process. Rather than resisting deterioration, his work allows objects to decompose, corrode, or fall apart over time, making the slow passage of time both visible and tangible. In his ‘Sacrificial Corrosion’ each object quietly records its own collapse. In this ongoing inquiry, Takahashi invites reflection on how both artwork and collection continually shift in meaning—quietly challenging the enduring illusion of permanence embodied by the display case.
The expression ‘turning the display case upside down’ points to more than a simple physical reordering of objects. Through their distinctive approaches to collecting, the artists quietly destabilize the systems we take for granted—exposing the fragile boundaries between inclusion and exclusion, memory and forgetting. As viewers move through the spatial constellations shaped by each artist, they encounter not only a visual language of inversion, but also the uncanny allure of a world turned inside out.
In this sense, 《Reverse Cabinet》 becomes a catalogue of realities we have yet to face. Beyond the surface of this inventory, the artists—as collectors—continue to pursue richer, subtler possibilities of what can be gathered and held. The exhibition’s final proposition is this: that the world is always capable of being re-collected, and that the unfolding of a new display—a new order—is one that ultimately opens itself to us.
Director : Yuli Yoon, Tomoya Iwata
Project manager: Jiseon Kim
