Hzone | Artistic Direction, Production & Installation of Artworks

The Floating Museum, located in Anjwa-do, Shinan-gun, Jeollanam-do, is a buoyant waterborne art museum built on the surface of the Sinchon Reservoir. Constructed near the birthplace of Whanki Kim, a pioneer of Korean abstract art, the museum's architectural design and permanent installations are directed by Japanese contemporary artist Yukinori Yanagi. Inspired by the white, square crystal structures of sea salt and the seven continents of the world, Yanagi designed the museum as seven cube-shaped structures positioned atop the water's surface.

Yukinori Yanagi is an artist who has critically explored modernity, the boundaries of nations and ethnicities, and ideological frameworks through his work. The Floating Museum, with its mutually reflective cube structures on the water, is an architectural manifestation of this philosophy, aiming to erase artificial borders and build a physical space where nature and art merge.

Hzone oversees the overall consulting and operational management, including project planning, artist collaboration coordination, and artwork production and installation. Through collaboration with Yukinori Yanagi, Hzone is establishing the central foundation for Shinan-gun's One Island, One Museum project and promoting a connection between the local community and artistic culture by enabling Anjwa-do to function as a cultural and artistic hub.

Ant Farm: Eurasia

Ant Farm: Eurasia is a large-scale installation piece that elaborately renders the expansive borders and territorial images across the Asian and European continents using colored sand. Live ants are released inside the structure, prompting them to dig tunnels and move. The process in which the artificial borders collapse and the sand of the continents gradually mixes due to the movement of the ants serves as a metaphor for the mutability and futility of territorial divisions and national borders historically constructed by humanity.

Ant Farm: Kangnido

Art Farm: Kangnido combines the ecological system of ants with the motif of the 'Honil Gangni Yeokdae Gukdo Ji Do (Kangnido)', a world map produced in Korea during the early Joseon Dynasty. The original map is an artifact imbued with the geopolitical views of its era, reflecting a Joseon-centered sphere of influence and depicting Japan as a diminutive peripheral island; however, through subsequent historical contexts, the copied version came to be housed in Japan. Focusing on this historical journey and narrative, Yanagi, a Japanese artist, summoned the iconography of this map back into the Korean museum space and released ants into it. The process of the ants dismantling borders and mixing the sand demonstrates a new connectivity that deconstructs past territorial obsessions.

Mud Ball

Mud Ball is a large-scale, sphere-shaped installation piece completed by rounding mud from the tidal flats of Shinan, an ecological asset registered as a UNESCO World Natural Heritage site. It stands as an extension of the 'Sphere Project', which the artist has pursued as his lifelong work over a long period. Seeking direct aesthetic inspiration from the behavior of the 'Scarab' (dung beetle), which symbolized the universe's cycle by rolling balls of earth in ancient mythology, the piece is placed within a jet-black exhibition space inside the museum to visualize the earth's vitality and cyclical system.

Salt Ball

Salt Ball is a giant, sphere-shaped installation piece created by directly collecting sun-dried sea salt, a local specialty and natural asset of Sinan, and shaping it into a round form. Like Mud Ball, this series was produced with inspiration drawn from the method by which the 'Scarab' forms spheres in ancient mythology. Placed alone inside a brightly lit, white exhibition space that contrasts with the dark room of the Mud Ball, it intuitively represents the pure purifying power of salt crystals obtained from nature and the earth's resilience in returning to its inherent material value.

Icarus

Icarus is an installation work inspired by the narrative of Icarus in Greek mythology, who flew toward the sun only to fall as his wings melted. The piece serves as a metaphor for the blind overconfidence in technology held by humanity during the process of modernization, as well as the inner ruin and limitations brought about by the expansion of human desire. Combined with the reservoir's water surface and the Floating Museum's waterborne mirror cube structures that reflect light in all directions, it provides visitors with a space to contemplate human desire and limitation between the horizon and the images projected on the water.

Client

Shinan County

Artist

Yukinori Yanagi