Argentine-Peruvian artist Adrián Villar Rojas presents his first solo exhibition in Korea, The Language of the Enemy, occupying all floors of Art Sonje Center. Running from September 3, 2025, to February 1, 2026, this exhibition is a special project commemorating the 30th anniversary of Art Sonje Center, in which the artist transforms the entire museum building into a large-scale sculptural ecosystem.
Strange Coexistence of Human, Non-Human, and Post-Human
Adrián Villar Rojas has explored diverse life forms and their complex relationships amid the current and future crises facing humanity. In this exhibition, he reinterprets the museum not as a site of preservation, but as a wild, unstable terrain where decomposition, mutation, and inheritance occur through non-human, post-human, and synthetic agents.
At the heart of the exhibition is Villar Rojas’s ongoing series The End of Imagination (2022–ongoing). These works appear as bizarre, hybrid forms, as if excavated from an unknowable future, welcoming visitors with a strange and chilling presence. For this exhibition, all floors of Art Sonje Center, from the basement to the third floor, are utilized in a bold attempt to dismantle the institutional apparatus and structure accumulated over thirty years.
The original entrance is blocked by a mound of earth, and the white temporary partitions, symbolic of the ‘white cube,’ are removed, exposing the building’s concrete framework. Furthermore, temperature and humidity controls are deliberately halted, and raw natural elements such as soil, fire, and plants are introduced, intentionally blurring the boundaries between the museum and the outside world, and between institutional space and planetary ecology.
A New Reality Created by the ‘Time Engine’
The sculptures presented in this exhibition originate from a digital simulation tool developed by the artist himself, the ‘Time Engine’. Combining video game engines, artificial intelligence, and speculative world-building, this tool allows Villar Rojas to construct digital worlds populated by evolving life forms, architectures, ecologies, and sociopolitical conditions. The virtual sculptures generated in these worlds are then ‘downloaded’ and meticulously realized in physical form in the real world.
These sculptures are layered composites of organic and inorganic materials, including metals, concrete, plastics, soil, glass, resin, salt, tree bark, and auto parts, each embedded with traces of both human and machine labor. Villar Rojas explains that the digital ecologies created through the Time Engine generate matter autonomously, describing a process in which a non-human world itself produces reality and creates materials.
‘The Language of the Enemy’: Collaborative Imagination between Humanity and AI
The exhibition title, The Language of the Enemy, stems from the artist’s belief that humanity did not invent systems of symbolism in isolation. Homo sapiens evolved alongside other human relatives—Neanderthals, Denisovans—and in those encounters, they shared not only tools, gestures, and fire, but also symbolic thought and the creation of meaning. Villar Rojas reflects on this paradox, suggesting that the ‘enemy’—this manifestation of absolute otherness—was both threatening and the mirror through which we first recognized ourselves.
Today, we face new ‘others,’ artificial intelligences whose languages we scarcely comprehend. Villar Rojas frames this situation as a practice of ‘collaborative imagination,’ inhabiting the liminal space between extinction and inheritance at a moment when humanity’s continuity is precarious.
This exhibition presents the outcome of a long-term project by Villar Rojas in Korea, following the Real DMZ Project (2014), the Anyang Public Art Project (2016), and the Gwangju Biennale (2018, 2021). Eleven members of the artist’s studio traveled from Argentina to Seoul to produce the works on-site over six weeks. The exhibition is open from Tuesday to Sunday, 12 PM to 6 PM. Admission is 10,000 KRW, with a limit of 30 visitors per 30-minute session. Provided by Sunjae Art Center, Photograph: Seowon Nam
