FRIEZE SEOUL 2026

Departing from the primarily planar mode of viewing in her earlier works, Shumu’s new sculptural works bring the woodcuts into space, creating a more complex visual experience through their shifting spatial relationships. When an image is placed within a frame, its meaning shifts with its spatial context. Standing in the middle of a space, the screens function as both physical and psychological partitions. As physical barriers, the screens interrupt the visual continuity of the surrounding world, connecting the imagined with the real. On the screens, the narrative continues: a vigorous horse steps into the grassland, skeletons give rise to butterflies, while flying crows weave the elements of the scene together, evoking the cycle of “life and death.” Yet Shumu does not stop the narrative solely in mourning: two white butterflies flutter from the pile of skeletons; though small in scale, they become points of light within the scene, drawing the viewer’s gaze and spirit upward. Here, disappearance and existence meet and reflect one another, continuing into each other.

In another group of installations, Shumu attempts to create a physical space for what has disappeared. Her inspiration comes from gamsil (감실), a traditional Korean object used in ancestral rites to house the spirits of the deceased. In East Asia, people share a similar tradition of viewing passing not as a rupture with the material world, but rather as a continuation of presence in another, more enduring form, continuing to accompany the living. Often taking the shape of miniature houses, gamsil are understood as dwellings for the absent, bridging the worlds of the living and the dead while holding the memories and longing of the living. Shumu retains gamsil’s architectural form and opening mechanism, replacing their interiors with her woodcut works. The subtle undulations of the wood surface echo the carved structures surrounding them, emphasizing the materiality of the works, while the spirituality embedded within them is simultaneously intensified through this material assembly. What is “absent” extends its presence through objects, transcending space and time.

Shumu’s attention to traces unfolds through an exceptionally precise and intricate process of carving. Her studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing gave her a strong grounding in the fundamental techniques of printmaking. Yet unlike traditional printmaking, in which the image transferred onto paper is regarded as the finished work, Shumu sees the woodblock itself as the site where traces emerge. Through repeated engagement with wood, the artist has developed a practice of her own: sanding, dyeing, waxing, and then carving the surface tens of thousands of times, until the marks slowly transform into the dense feathers of an egret, the upright stems of water plants, the innocent gaze of a deer, and the distant layers of the sky. With limited use of colour, lines of varying depths and directions overlap through repetition or remain absent, gradually giving rise to subtle variations in texture. The marks left by the artist merge with the wood’s own natural grain, while objects become increasingly elusive through continual processes of accumulation and erasure.

“Brushing Against” moves beyond the mere replication of the natural world, opening onto questions of existence and eternity. Like two intersecting marks carved into a board, those seemingly fleeting encounters slowly extend through the depths of time.

About the artist

Shumu was born in 1994 in Seoul, South Korea. She obtained her BFA in woodcut and copperplate print from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2017. She currently lives and works in Seoul. Shumu’s work contemplates the profound stillness that dwells on the boundary between the real and the unreal, a quietude where presence lingers without explanation and forms reveal themselves in moments of suspension. She engages with woodcut as a daily ritual, exploring the material nature of the wood rather than its function as a printing plate. Rooted in the techniques of printmaking, Shumu pushes her control over the pressure and angle of carving to an extreme. Extremely fine incisions form countless delicate lines, which are layered with dark ink to create the distinctive texture of the wood’s surface. Drawing from the innate flow of woodgrain and the physical traces of her brush on wooden panels, her realistic renderings of animals emerge almost paradoxically like wandering spirits. These creatures, both corporeal and spectral, inhabit quiet yet slightly uncanny spaces. The figures are presences that are felt deeply yet remain elusive, occupying the threshold between body and soul, the delicate gap between the self and the surroundings, the presence and the absence.

Her recent solo exhibitions include: “Brushing Against”, 2026, Frieze Seoul, with LINSEED, Seoul; “Twilight Forest”, 2025, gallery hue, Seoul. Her selected group exhibitions include: “A Stir, A Touch, A Warmth” (Duo), 2026, LKIF GALLERY, Seoul and Venice; “The Skin of Thoughts”, 2025, GALLERY IN HQ, Seoul; “At the Corner”, 2025, Paris International, with LINSEED, Paris; “What We Have Lost”, 2025, artsohyang, Busan; “A Trace Without A Tail”, 2025, LINSEED, Shanghai; “Fading White”, 2025, gallery hue, Seoul; “玄, 검정, BLACK”, 2024, Tsutayabooks Ginzasix, Tokyo.