In Seoul, Henri Alexander Levy Reconstructs a Past He Never Lived

Seoul’s Cheongdam-dong district is known for its boutiques and, increasingly, for its galleries. Up a sloping street and into the stark white building of Shinsegae Gallery Cheongdam, was an unexpected sanctuary amid the business of Seoul art week. Here, an exhibition by the American artist Henri Alexander Levy, titled Final Achievement Is Ruin, spans abstract paintings, wall-based collages and assemblages, a long metal-mesh enclosure, and vitrines of collected ephemera. It opens with an armless, elongated figure hanging by a chain inside a metal frame—suspended and vulnerable. 

Levy is the founder of the cult fashion label Enfants Riches Déprimés and terms himself an “outsider artist”. The artist, born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1991, traces his practice to childhood: while staying with his grandmother in Mexico City, he would paint with oils and make assemblages. In his adolescence, he moved through elite Swiss boarding schools and repeated periods in addiction treatment, and he has described those years as full of conflicts with his parents, teachers and treatment staff. That history would later bear on his art, where paternal, institutional and religious authority become difficult to separate. The artist now describes himself as both a collector and “someone who reconstructs”, repurposing found material and occasionally placing it alongside his own history. He works in the same way with his fashion label. Enfants Riches Déprimés’ autumn 2018 collection, for instance, used a photograph from a vintage yearbook of Levy’s school; a jacket from the same collection had its torn shoulder fastened with zip ties. That combination of borrowed imagery and visible damage also recurs in Levy’s collages. 

In the room of early works, my attention settled on two low vitrines filled with books, snapshots and papers from Levy’s collection. Among them were High Risk: Children Without a Conscience, a pink pamphlet marked with an anarchist “A”, an Enfants Riches Déprimés publication titled Dictatorship, and jewellery, a padlock, and a battered envelope. Levy referred to the collection as “sentimental”: there are the yearbook pictures, childhood and wedding photographs, alongside images of soldiers going to war, many dating from the 1950s and 1960s. Collected from other people’s lives, these objects form an autobiography at one remove. 

On the walls around the vitrines, early collages mix religious imagery with the language of punishment and paternal authority. One sheet features the words “Prepare to Meet Thy” around a heavy black cross, with praying hands and a Sacred Heart in opposite corners. Reproductions of Christ appear amid torn paper, black paint and close-ups of a mouth. Above a photograph of singing boys, handwritten fragments read “German soil” and “inherit from the father”, while a thick black brushstroke cuts through the group. “Crime & Punishment” and “Sacred Order” appear on other sheets, blurring the line between devotion and discipline. 

“The photographs and relics in Levy’s collages and assemblages begin to resemble memories without owners ”

In Levy’s recent canvases and assemblages, slogans recede as broad fields of colour take over. In Untitled (Brown Painting) (2026), a pale piece of antique fabric interrupts a large expanse of brown and near-black. The small assemblage Untitled (Assemblage 14 / Book of Charlie) (2026) places a child’s portrait on white-painted wood, with a wide, dark red band fixed above it and an Iron Cross pendant below. The child appears oddly vulnerable between them, while the photograph’s careful mounting gives the assemblage the intimacy of a private keepsake. 

Detached from their original contexts, the photographs and relics in Levy’s collages and assemblages begin to resemble memories without owners. Against the disorder of the present, even authority can begin to look like belonging.—[O] 

Henri Alexander Levy, Final Achievement is Ruin (until 17 October) at Shinsegae Gallery, Cheongdam-dong 

Main image: Henri Alexander Levy, Final Achievement Is Ruin, Shinsegae Gallery, Seoul (2026). Courtesy Shinsegae Gallery. Photo: Hong Cheolki.