adrián villar rojas transforms seoul's art sonje center

Adrián Villar Rojas’s exhibition takes over Art Sonje Center

The Language of the Enemy marks Adrián Villar Rojas’s first solo exhibition in Korea and the first time in the institution’s history that a single project overtakes all four floors of Seoul’s Art Sonje Center, including corridors, stairwells, restrooms, and peripheral spaces.

To achieve this transformation, Villar Rojas dismantles the building’s internal systems. Temporary partitions are removed, surfaces stripped back to their structural core, and even the climate controls are abandoned to expose the architecture to external forces of heat, humidity, and air. Soil and vegetation breach the interior, fire is introduced as both material and process, and exit signs glow as ambient lighting. Visitors enter through a mound of earth, stepping into a space where the categories of inside and outside, ecological and institutional, begin to collapse.

At the heart of the exhibition that runs until February 1st, 2026, lies the ongoing series The End of Imagination (2022–ongoing), whose chimerical sculptures appear like artifacts excavated from a future that has already forgotten us. The works are generated through Villar Rojas’s bespoke Time Engine, a digital simulation that merges video game technologies, artificial intelligence, and speculative world-building. From this tool, evolving synthetic ecologies emerge, populated by shifting life forms, architectures, and sociopolitical landscapes. Between 2021 and 2024, the artist and his longtime team began ‘downloading’ these digital beings and painstakingly reconstituting them as physical sculptures.

all images by Seowon Nam

sculptures at the Threshold of Human and Machine

Fabricated in a temporary workshop in Rosario, Argentina, the works are layered composites of organic and inorganic matter made of concrete, salt, resin, glass, soil, auto parts, tree bark, and industrial debris. Each surface retains traces of its digital origin and the collective human and machinic labor that shaped it. Argentine-Peruvian artist Villar Rojas describes this reversal of authorship. ‘I model worlds, and the worlds model ”sculptures” for me,’ he explains.

The exhibition title points to deeper evolutionary entanglements. Reflecting on The Language of the Enemy, Villar Rojas situates symbolic thought not as an exclusively human invention but as a shared inheritance forged in encounters with other hominin species, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, at once hostile and intimate. Today, he suggests, we face a similar threshold with synthetic intelligences whose ‘languages we barely comprehend.’ The project stages this encounter within Seoul’s Art Sonje Center itself, recasting the institution as a laboratory and ruin.

The ambitious transformation of the venue was realized on-site over six weeks by a group of eleven collaborators, many of whom have worked with Villar Rojas since 2009. Operating like a hive mind or terraforming crew, they constructed the exhibition as a handmade ecosystem. The project also resonates historically, commemorating the inaugural exhibition held three decades ago in the same building that marked Art Sonje Center’s establishment as a key space for contemporary art in Seoul.

The Language of the Enemy marks Adrián Villar Rojas’s first solo exhibition in Korea