Jinjoon Lee: The Sacred Mountain

Marking Gallery VER’s 20th anniversary, Jinjoon Lee’s solo exhibition The Sacred Mountain is on view in Bangkok. The exhibition asks what we hold sacred, and how we might sustain our relationship with nature and with machines in an age when AI treats even the human mind and memory as things to be decoded and reconstructed.

The exhibition spans moving image, sound, sculpture, painting and drawing. It brings together the artist’s daily breath, hands that burn and polish driftwood, a machine that repeats a ritual, sound generated by a model built on the connectome of a fruit fly, and a mountain remembered from the artist’s childhood hometown. Audiences walk into a symphony orchestrated by the artist and become part of it. Through this encounter, the artist asks what meaning our art holds as we seek to shape and protect the sacred in the era of AI. 

In Thailand, where the exhibition takes place, Mount Sumeru stands at the centre of the Buddhist cosmos. The Meru, the crematorium of a Thai temple, is named after this mountain, and Thai Buddhist funerals traditionally culminate in cremation. Charred driftwood gathered in Thailand is placed alongside a mountain burning on screen, while a machine repeats the gestures of mourning.

When a machine performs the gestures of ritual, is the longing within them transmitted? When a vanished landscape is regenerated, where does the time lived there persist? As digital resolution effaces mystery, where does the sacred dwell? Can art still set us free, and can nature still save us?

Jinjoon Lee is a media artist and scholar based in Seoul and Oxford, whose exhibitions and commissioned projects span Asia, Europe, and the Americas. His research framework, Gardenetics, reframes the garden as an ethical and aesthetic alternative to cybernetic models of control, proposing cultivation rather than control as a way to rethink our relationship with data and AI. His doctoral project, Empty Garden, is held in the permanent collection of the Ashmolean Museum.

Gallery VER (Bangkok, Thailand) was founded in Bangkok in 2006 as an artist-led initiative. It is a contemporary art gallery working with conceptually driven practices across generations and media. The gallery values long-term collaboration and supports artists in developing and presenting their work within thoughtful and experimental frameworks. Operating as a hybrid platform, Gallery VER balances commercial activity with a strong commitment to artists’ professional growth. The gallery focuses on expanding artists’ visibility through exhibitions, projects, and participation in regional and international platforms—including institutions, art events and biennales, as well as art fairs—connecting their practices with diverse audiences. Committed to fostering dialogue and exploring evolving relationships between art and the public, Gallery VER continues to evolve as a flexible platform for artistic experimentation, exchange, and sustained artistic development as it enters its third decade.