This fall, Adrián Villar Rojas brings his most ambitious site-specific installation to date to Seoul’s Art Sonje Center, marking both his first solo exhibition in Korea and the first time the institution has dedicated all four of its floors to a single artist. Running until February 1st, 2026, the project transforms the building into a living, decaying ecosystem where architecture itself becomes part of the artwork.
‘The Language of the Enemy’
Titled The Language of the Enemy, the exhibition dismantles the museum’s interior systems to expose the structure to natural forces. Climate controls are removed, surfaces stripped bare, and soil and vegetation infiltrate the building, while fire and glowing exit signs reshape the atmosphere. Visitors enter through a mound of earth, encountering a collapse of boundaries between inside and outside, ecological and institutional space.
Digital simulation and ‘The End of Imagination’
At the exhibition’s core lies The End of Imagination (2022–ongoing), a series of hybrid sculptures that seem unearthed from a forgotten future. Generated through Villar Rojas’s bespoke digital simulation tool known as the Time Engine, the works merge video game technologies, artificial intelligence, and speculative world-building to create synthetic ecologies. These digital forms are then painstakingly “downloaded” into physical sculptures, crafted from concrete, resin, glass, soil, tree bark, and industrial debris.
Works that reshape time
Among the highlights are chimerical objects that resemble archaeological relics, bearing traces of both organic life and machine logic, and a monumental steel-and-resin form that feels simultaneously futuristic and fossilized. Each piece underscores Villar Rojas’s reversal of authorship, where worlds generate sculptures as much as the artist himself.
By staging this unprecedented transformation of Art Sonje Center, Villar Rojas invites audiences into a threshold space—between extinction and inheritance, human and non-human intelligence—where the languages of enemies, past and future, collide.
Photography by SEOWON NAM
Courtesy of ART SONJE CENTER