Minouk Lim: Hyper Yellow

Ilmin Museum of Art (Director: Kim Taeryung) is pleased to present Hyper Yellow, a solo exhibition of Minouk Lim (b. 1968), on view from February 28 to April 20. The exhibition presents over thirty years of Lim’s artistic practice and traces the subtle sensitivities she seeks to preserve and the vision of beauty she pursues as an artist. This exhibition highlights Minouk Lim’s concept of “Hyper Yellow,” investigating the interplay between urban spaces and artistic practice. Emerging through a research grant from the Obayashi Foundation three years ago, “Hyper Yellow” refers to a state of exceeding or surpassing yellow―extending beyond color to signify the complex geopolitical and cultural space of the Yellow Sea. Beyond colors, the discussion is expanded to the geographical and cultural space of the Yellow Sea, which mediates the Northeast Asian Sinitic cultures, including Korea, China, and Japan.

The prefix “hyper-” denotes both an excess and a transgression. The notion of synchronicity, the crux of Lim’s worldview, refers to meaningful coincidences in which multiple events align through the kinship of images. In the exhibition, Lim constructs a unique temporal perspective in which the past, future, and present are interconnected within a nature of moving time that transcends a specific locality while exploring moments of future collisions through an archaeological approach. At this junction, Hyper Yellow merges speculative fiction and archaeology elements to envision a moment when “the unknown” arrives and collides with history.

Solaris (2025), a gigantic installation work that occupies the entirety of the Ilmin Museum of Art’s Hall 1, takes its name from a science fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem published in 1961. This work weaves together the imagination of a hidden chamber of Tōdai-jiㅡa Japanese temple in Naraㅡthe future of the Earth and an unknown existing planet while creating a different space-time from the present. The disparate times and spaces transform into a “runway into another world,” where unknown beings appear as two disk images—reminiscent of the sun—approaching and merging with one another. It is here that viewers begin their journey as tourists exploring an unknown place.

Works presented in Hall 2 transmit a complex cradle of cultural exchange into the present. Alongside installations, sculptures and drawings, the space features the three-channel video work East Sea Story (2024), which encapsulates the artist’s extensive research into the concept of “Hyper Yellow” while transcending given geographical and historical boundaries. Notably, this hall showcases key works from Minouk Lim’s Portable Keeper series, which she has been developing since 2009 aligned with Nara Portable Keeper (2024-2025). This piece takes the form of the giant bamboo torches used in the Omizutori ceremony (the Festival of Fire), and East Sea Portable Keeper (2024), West Sea Portable Keeper (2024) and Yellow Sea Portable Keeper (2025), which embody the sea as a conduit of exchange. While Lim’s earlier Portable Keeper was a direct response to the results of rapid industrialization and urban development in the late 20th century, the recent work reflects the artist’s efforts to understand the things that appear like echoes of the past in the new century.

Exhibition Hall 3 reveals Lim’s comprehensive artistic practices with materiality, techniques, and aesthetic vision. It presents works that employ terracotta—a key material used to construct the imaginary environment of Solaris—in a planar format, alongside pieces that experiment with methods of preservation, such as Mountain & Water Patterned Tiles (2024-2025) series which hardens materials to retain memory. Alongside, Confluence (2023) series captures impressions of surfaces through casting. In the Project Room, a documentary video S.O.S-Run Shin Shin (2024-2025) captures the site-specific performance under the same title, which took place in March 2024 along Tokyo’s Sumida River and Tokyo Bay. The performance invokes Shin Shin meaning the “new god” described as “water ripples, a thousand years collapse, ten thousand rises, running with fire.” This deity embodies perpetual cycles of emergence and disappearance, mirroring the transient nature of existence and the figures of toraijin (people who come over to Japan)—the one who arrives from across the water.

Ilmin Museum of Art situates her work within broader currents of cultural discourse and philosophy of technology, examining how her aesthetic inquiry engages with the imperfections of life and opens a space for embracing the tensions and fractures of reality.