In this exhibition, Hyungji Park and Eun Yeoung Lee trace the image of a vanished stone from within a locked garden, Park through painting and Lee through drawing. Eun Yeoung Lee presents a collection of her drawings in the form of a book, alongside sculptural works based on ceramic. In response, Park offers paintings born of a process she describes as “failure and ruining.”
Across the works that comprise the exhibition, the stone appears as both object and absence—its disappearance transforming it from a solid entity into something soft, conceptual, and mutable. In Lee’s drawing book, the stone emerges blotched and mottled; in Park’s paintings, it takes on a rugged, uneven form. At times, the missing stone becomes the stone thief himself—subject to displacement and metamorphosis, a hollow vessel made fluid and itinerant. In the end, the stone disappears entirely, and it is in the artists’ respective attempts to pursue this disappearance that the viewer’s gaze is drawn. The fragmented narratives that unfold—across canvas and page, through images layered and scattered—quietly reveal themselves as the exhibition’s central thread.
Though both artists begin from a shared premise, their approaches diverge markedly. Park expands the narrative both inwardly and outwardly—extending beyond the visible bounds of the canvas. While the single “real” scene may be that of a garden from which the stone has vanished, the moments Park captures include Garden with Stones, The Stone Settled in Another Garden I, and the elusive, imagined Stone Thief II. Her paintings, built through successive acts of failure and erasure, develop richly textured surfaces that suggest stratified depths. In parallel, the scenes she evokes compel us to imagine narrative possibilities beyond the edges of the work itself. Lee, by contrast, traces the gaze of the thief. In her drawing The Mottled Stones Found While on a Very Short Stroll, the perspective is inevitably that of the one who covets absence. These are landscapes as filtered through desire. Her obsessive linework and the fragmentary progression of images convey a kind of fixation—a slow, deliberate circling around the vanished. The garden of engraved(drawn) stone(ceramic) emerges as a symbolic setting, perhaps both the beginning and end of the thief/story.
What began as a quiet conversation between two artists about a missing stone has become an exhibition that unfolds in both directions—within and beyond the image. It is our hope that attentive, unhurried viewers will continue this unfolding, enriching its manifold possibilities through their own lingering gaze.