ART BASEL HONG KONG 2026

The presentation brings together a series of paintings and sculptures developed around a fictional Neanderthal man named Peter, whose imagined excavation becomes the lens through which Ryu examines the layered materiality and temporality of painting. Using archaeological and museological imagery, the artist explores how images can become physical records of time—traces of gesture, labor, and surface memory.

While painting is often viewed as a visual medium, Ryu’s work foregrounds its tactile nature. For her, painting’s untouchable surface paradoxically intensifies the viewer’s imagined sense of touch. The illusion of tactility emerges not only through material buildup but through the marks of time itself—dust caught in drying paint, translucent layers, and lingering brushstrokes. These elements offer a record of the artist’s physical presence and process, rendering the image a kind of visual relic.

The story of Peter is inspired by the excavation of Neanderthal remains in the Shanidar Cave in Iraq. In Ryu’s narrative, Peter dies under a pistachio tree at the age of thirty-two and is later buried with a bouquet of wildflowers by his wife. Though entirely fictional, this story frames the paintings and sculptures in the booth as visual artifacts—images and objects shaped by time, narrative, and imagined excavation. Ryu draws a direct parallel between the archaeologist’s hand and the painter’s: both uncover layers, both handle fragments, and both work within the tension of material presence and historical distance.

The presentation will include floor-based clay sculptures of two archaeologists in the act of excavating Peter’s remains. On the surrounding walls, large-scale paintings depict laboratory scenes, skeletal studies, and museum visitors posing in front of Neanderthal models and dinosaur displays. A clay bust of Peter—imagined in life—sits at the center, anchoring the project’s speculative nature. These works reference the institutional framing of history and science, yet Ryu resists didactic narrative. Instead, she creates ambiguous images where fiction and evidence collapse into one another.

Executed in multiple thin layers, Ryu’s paintings are visually smooth yet dense with process. Each surface bears the trace of slow time: visible sketch lines, atmospheric washes, and the residue of previous marks. This build-up of material evokes a sense of accumulated memory, recalling the sensation of standing before a centuries-old painting or artifact—objects that seem to “breathe,” suspended in time.

Through Peter, Yaerim Ryu collapses distinctions between history and fiction, scientific objectivity and artistic speculation. In doing so, she proposes an expanded language for painting—one that engages the viewer not only visually, but materially and emotionally, through the weight of time made visible on its surface.