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This edition’s advertised period has ended. Below is the information published for 2026; it does not confirm that the event took place.

Collectors' Walk: A Stroll Through Collections. · 2026 · Historical listing

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Information for this edition

Dates
Oct 10, 2026 — Nov 7, 2026
Place
Hidden M Gallery · 16 Nonhyeon-ro 86-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul; 16 Nonhyeon-ro 86-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
Admission at the time
Free
Facts last checked
2026-10-19
First preserved here
2026-10-22

Published programme

Hidden M Gallery will present the 2-person exhibition “Collectors' Walk” by Yoon Jong-seok and the Berlin-based Japanese artist Ken’ichiro Taniguchi from October 10 to November 7. The exhibition introduces the work of 2 artists who have walked through different places, collecting landscapes and traces they encountered by chance. While Yoon records the landscapes, objects, and sensations left by moments on his travels, Taniguchi focuses on cracks and damage in urban roads and walls. Although the 2 artists look at different subjects, their perspectives meet in rediscovering everyday landscapes and traces and transforming them through their own visual languages. Yoon Jong-seok's work begins with recording the landscapes and objects he encounters while traveling, together with the sensations he experiences among them. For the artist, travel is both an experience of unfamiliar places and a time to look at his surroundings differently from usual. Scenes he might have passed without a thought in familiar surroundings appear new elsewhere; particular colors, forms, and arrangements of objects may be remembered with exceptional clarity. Rather than reproducing a landscape exactly as it looks before him, he records in his own visual language what he discovered there and the impressions it made. The work thus moves beyond representing a particular place to become a record left by the gaze and sensations through which it was experienced. For this exhibition, Yoon stayed in Hokkaido, observing new landscapes and objects and incorporating the objects and scenes he discovered into his work. He vividly remembers the land seen from the air above Hokkaido. Neatly arranged farmland stretched widely, and ocher-red soil showing between pale-green fields created a clear contrast and tension. Seen from above, the landscape approached him as an overall scene formed by the structure and colors of the land, beyond the shapes of individual objects. Meanwhile, objects encountered in different places during his stay in Hokkaido caught his eye in another way. The new works in this exhibition, including 15 drawings, contain impressions of expansive landscapes and objects individually discovered while traveling, each expressed differently. The gaze that surveys the whole landscape and the gaze that moves close to an object before it remain different records within 1 shared experience of travel. In Yoon's work, travel does not stop at recording the landscape before him. He attends to the scenes and objects he encounters and articulates their impressions through his own visual language. A scene encountered while traveling is remembered with the experience of that moment, yet is selected and composed anew as it becomes a work. Some landscapes remain as impressions of overall color and form; some objects are remembered as distinct from their surroundings. The scenes collected in this way are not information explaining 1 place but accumulated records of time and attention spent there. His work shows travel landscapes again while also showing how a place can remain as different images as it passes through an individual's senses. Ken’ichiro Taniguchi has observed and collected cracks and depressions in urban roads and walls. He calls these traces “hecomi,” derived from the Japanese verb “heko-mu.” Heko-mu refers both to a physical indentation in a surface and to a state of emotional dejection or depression. Taniguchi focuses on cracks and damage that arise naturally on the artificially made surfaces of cities. Such traces are generally considered old and dirty, defects to be repaired or concealed. Yet he discovers distinctive shapes and expressions in them. Rather than treating a damaged surface simply as a defect, he believes that carefully observing the form itself reveals qualities including charm, resilience, and sadness. His work begins by asking what we see, and what we have passed over, on the everyday surfaces of the city. In his hecomi work, ongoing since 2000, Taniguchi has observed roads and walls in cities around the world, collecting forms he likes and recording them as “stock shapes.” To date, roughly 600 hecomi collected in approximately 50 countries form an archive of the shapes he has continuously explored. Yet the collected traces do not merely record their original places. He transforms them in different ways, including drawings, map-like arrangements, and volumetric sculptures, exploring the possibilities of form. A crack that arose by chance on an urban surface is separated from its original place through the artist's observation and intervention, emerging as a new sculptural presence. This transformation is concretely expressed in his different works. Taniguchi records and arranges the hecomi forms he has collected, developing them into new sculptural structures. In the “Hecomi Maps” series, forms are arranged in particular ways so they can be compared and observed. Individual traces unfold like 1 illustrated reference book, revealing differences among their distinct outlines and shapes. In the “Hecomi Fitting” series, by contrast, he cuts hecomi forms from recycled compressed PVC sheets and fits them back into the actual cracks. Bright-yellow artificial material meets the organic cracks of urban surfaces, transforming traces considered defects into bright, lively presences. For the artist, this process is not simply concealing or repairing cracks but a sculptural act that respects their forms and reveals them in a new way. His interest in working with hecomi forms expands from the plane into spatial volume. In the “Hecomi Study” series, he divides forms into parts, connects them with hinges, and folds and unfolds them to find the most suitable volumetric form. Flat outlines fold and move, becoming sculptures that occupy space; instead of remaining 1 fixed form, they are reconfigured in different ways. These sculptures, which can move like toys, make the repeated exploration and transformation of hecomi forms part of the work itself. A small trace encountered by chance on an urban surface thus reveals new sculptural possibilities through observation, recording, transformation, and reconstruction. Recently, Taniguchi's interests have expanded from individual cracks to a perspective on the whole city. In the “City Study Series,” he explores cities from an aerial viewpoint, focusing on a gaze that moves between microscopic forms and macroscopic urban structures. The gaze that observed small traces on urban surfaces now shifts to the entire space in which they are situated. Individual cracks and urban structures are connected, rather than treated as separate subjects, as scenes that allow the city to be understood at different scales. The suspended installation “City Study for Seoul, Korea,” presented in this exhibition, extends this interest to Seoul. Having collected traces from urban surfaces, the artist continues a new sculptural investigation with Seoul as his subject. Suspended in the air, the installation allows the work to be seen outside its familiar ground-level context and prompts viewers to perceive the relationship between work and space anew. By placing forms discovered on urban surfaces in different positions and perspectives, it also seeks to draw attention to how we look at places themselves. As the artist's interest grows from individual traces to a viewpoint encompassing the whole city, this new work reveals a new phase in observing a particular city and investigating its structure through sculptural form. The 2 artists begin with different places and subjects, yet share a process of discovery and observation. Yoon focuses on landscapes and objects encountered on his travels and records the sensations of those moments in his works. Taniguchi discovers cracks left on urban surfaces, extracts their forms, and transforms them into new sculptural presences. While 1 artist leaves the landscapes encountered while traveling as records of sensation and memory, the other collects and reconstructs urban traces to reveal the possibilities of form latent within them. The subjects collected by the 2 artists differ, but both begin by refusing to take the familiar world for granted and looking at it again through their own eyes. The work of the 2 artists also forms an interesting relationship in the distance from which they view places. Yoon's new works bring together wide landscapes seen from above and objects encountered at close range during his travels. Taniguchi's work likewise begins by observing the forms of individual cracks and expands to a viewpoint encompassing the whole city. Although the 2 artists start in different contexts, their works show that a close gaze and a distant view of the whole are different ways of understanding a place. Seen from afar, the structure composing a landscape emerges; approached closely, small forms and traces within it become visible. Rather than presenting a place as 1 fixed image, the work of the 2 artists allows it to be seen as something rediscovered through different distances and perspectives. In “Collectors' Walk,” walking is not simply moving from place to place. It is a process of observing their surroundings, lingering over chance encounters, and recording discoveries in their own way. For Yoon, travel is a time to discover new sensations through landscapes and objects; for Taniguchi, the city is a place to find traces that might ordinarily be passed by. As these discoveries become artworks, they create new meaning beyond the moments experienced in their original places. Collecting preserves past scenes while also allowing them to be seen again in another way. We encounter countless landscapes and traces every day, but do not remember or examine them all closely. Familiar landscapes become backgrounds, and small cracks are considered damage and recede from sight. Yet if we slow our steps and look, scenes passed without thought reveal their own forms and time. What the 2 artists discovered and collected on their respective journeys arises from precisely this change in attention. We hope this exhibition offers a time to view familiar landscapes and everyday traces from a slightly different distance and discover new scenes remaining within them.

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