51.5072° N, 0.1275° W
37.5665° N, 126.9780° W
Boyoung Oh
This exhibition served as the inaugural project of the artistic platform A-ZIMUTH and was initiated with the aim of fostering meaningful connections among Korean artists based in London while creating a space where their diverse practices could be shared and explored collectively. The A-ZIMUTH seeks to bring together Korean artists who have been working across different locations in London, enabling them to meet within a shared environment and continue developing their practices over time. For this reason alone, setting the exhibition’s theme as “Liminal Coordinates” was a natural choice.
The word Azimuth, which is also the name of the collective, literally means “coordinate,” and here the coordinate refers to a guidepost that indicates the direction for the next movement. For A-ZIMUTH, and for the artists who work in this place, the city of London is a point of transit within a process of learning, experimenting, forming relationships, and then moving again to another place (in the A-ZIMUTH opening statement). The purpose that has been formed through this process also lies not in designing a place of settlement, but in becoming a coordinate that guides a meaningful direction. With this context, the present exhibition goes beyond the previously mentioned conventional notion of exhibition and has the character of an experimental site that presents new practices in contemporary art.
The exhibition brought together 10 Korean artists working across a range of media, including painting, sculpture, video, and photography. This diversity went beyond formal variation, functioning as a device through which the exhibition’s central theme of “boundary” could be explored in multiple ways. The participating artists’ works blurred temporal and physical distinctions that have conventionally been understood as fixed—such as self and other, life and death, or beginning and end—inviting these boundaries to be interpreted from a more coordinate-based and relational perspective shaped through movement, connection, and transition.
Upon entering the exhibition space, the first impression is the density of the environment. Some visitors commented that the concentration of works felt somewhat intense, yet this very density became one of the exhibition’s most compelling qualities. The interior remained dark without being completely engulfed in darkness, and the works—installed while negotiating the raw, site-specific qualities of the space—maintained a refined sense of order. From the entrance to the staircase leading to the second floor, artworks were placed closely together, allowing viewers to naturally slow down as they moved through the space. This slowing down created moments of concentration. At the same time, the condensed density of the exhibition revealed a ‘rhizomatic’ condition in which different voices gathered within a single site. It may be premature to reach a definitive conclusion, yet the exhibition’s atmosphere, in line with its central premise, maintained a state in which beginnings and endings, centre and periphery, and interior and exterior could not be clearly distinguished. Rather than compelling the viewer toward a fixed message, the exhibition seemed more concerned with the possibility that disparate elements might come together in combination to form a whole.
At the entrance, Jooyoung Moon’s Evanescent Susurrus (2025) functions as a point of departure that sets the tone of the exhibition. Within a small space filled with video and sound, different sonic fragments emerge and disappear as if drifting in the air, some remaining only as sensory traces in the viewer’s memory. The work offers a strong insight into the exhibition’s key themes of existence and disappearance, gradually immersing the viewer into the conceptual atmosphere of the exhibition while heightening the intensity of the viewing experience.
This sensory atmosphere is translated into more concrete visual imagery in Hongil Yoon’s The Heart of Bacchus (2025). Through deliberate distortions in composition, the work constructs a liminal zone situated at the boundary, inviting viewers to move beyond fixed perspectives.
Following this, Youngseok Oh’s What We Own (2024) and Chaeeun Kim’s Han-Ttam (2025) quietly draw the viewer’s gaze. This trajectory continues in Sandy Kim’s To the Body (2025), which reveals not so much the objects themselves as the desires and instincts surrounding them, along with the gradual accumulation of personal memories and experiences. Although the three works differ in form, they share an attention to transformations unfolding over time, suggesting that the boundaries between materiality and the self, or between sensation and memory, are never clearly fixed.
While the works placed near the entrance were more directly connected to the exhibition’s theme, the works on the second floor enriched the exhibition’s texture by adding the distinct voices of individual artists.
Jaine Hum’s Bedtime Story (2025) and Goosohee’s I know you love me, but (2025) present clearly different artistic styles. Nevertheless, they share a conceptual concern with exploring subtle emotions emerging in everyday life, attempting to depict the contradictions embedded in the unstable and highly tense interiority of human experience. These works suggest that the act of drawing boundaries ultimately originates from individual sensation and lived experience. In these seemingly minor yet precisely relatable moments, the viewer’s gaze lingered for a long time.
Similarly, Kyungmin Nam’s Morbid Fascination (2025) considers incompleteness not as a deficiency but as a generative aesthetic that opens possibilities for relationships yet to emerge. Jiwon Jang’s The Latent Objects (2026) investigates artificial intelligence while paradoxically asking what it means to see from a truly human perspective. Meanwhile, Doy Kim’s Mockup (2024) and Exuvia alba silentis (2025) explore new forms of vitality emerging from industrial waste and contaminated materials. Together, these works reveal states in which oppositions remain interconnected rather than separated, suggesting that the “boundary” discussed in this exhibition is not a concept designed for division but rather a process through which movement toward the next stage becomes possible.
Ultimately, the overarching theme of the exhibition lies in reconsidering the meaning contained within the notion of “boundary” from different perspectives, and in rethinking the questions it raises. Only when a boundary is given can a new direction begin. Elements that move in different directions—such as life and death, above and below, staying and moving—coexist within this exhibition without being separated. Such an attitude reflects the role of the “platform” that A-ZIMUTH seeks to embody. It would be for this reason that they chose the concept of “boundary” as the theme of the inaugural exhibition. As a result, the opening exhibition 《Liminal Coordinates》 became the first coordinate through which Korean artists working in London could recognise one another’s positions. In this sense, the exhibition may be recorded as a meaningful point of departure, in that it leaves open the possibility of future relationships and movements, while revealing the direction toward which A-ZIMUTH seeks to move.