Hyunah Koh creates a new ecology by merging painting with mixed reality, melting the boundaries between the virtual and the physical, the seen and the felt. This is her exploration of what painting can be.

By combining MR technology, painterly eruptions, physical space, and tactile sensations, she invites the audience to go through the painting together. Her work blurs the boundary between reality and painting, like sunlight slowly soaking into a surface. Through interaction, the senses of the audience and the artist become connected. Like a quiet breath, this mindful expansion draws us deeper into the painting and into ourselves.

Bengal Rose and Tadpoles into the Abyss is an immersive painting series composed of eight large-scale works that form a spatial environment where memory, matter, and transformation unfold. Made with acrylic, modeling clay, paper, red earth gesso, and printed dustsheet, each surface extends beyond the frame, spilling into space like a landscape in flux.

Together, these eight paintings explore the intersection of evolution and ecology. Each painting was born from signals that emerged like seasonal currents, indivisible from the flow of time, arriving as intuitive moments of painting. Ecology emerges through relationships. In Hyunah Koh’s paintings, earthy colors dominate, with frequent use of earth red pigments and a bold, diverse palette that resists fixed definitions. This spectrum of undefined colors becomes a language of courage, shaped by intuitive signals that arrive through the rhythms of time and season.

Her paintings hold fragments of life — cicadas in summer, frogs near water, tadpoles awakening in spring, and ice melting in winter. Through repeated layering and material sensitivity, these elements gather over time, transforming each painting into a quiet, living ecosystem.

They are not static images but evolving terrains, where sensation and transformation unfold in tandem. The process is cyclical and alive. Painting continuously returns in new forms, shaped by memory, matter, and the accumulated rhythm of touch..

“Immersive environments to be entered, evolving with time, space, and touch.”

When viewed through XR (Extended Reality), which refers to the spectrum of technologies including virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, the paintings activate further. In Koh’s case, she works specifically with Mixed Reality (MR), where digital elements are layered over physical works and respond in real time to the viewer’s gaze and position. Tadpoles spill from the surface, and stillness gives way to subtle motion.

By combining her paintings with mixed reality, Koh creates an expanded perspective and immersive ways of perceiving.

Approaching Mixed Reality not simply as a tool, but as a perceptual space, Koh invites viewers into a layered experience where perception shifts not only visually, but sensorially. This interaction is not just about seeing, but about reawakening the senses. Rediscovering subtle textures, movements, and moments that lie beneath the surface of the painting. The MR layer reveals what cannot be fully seen or told through painting alone. For Koh, this is a form of sensorial storytelling, where the expanded perception of space and memory unfolds as a second evolving ground of meaning. The sculptural works placed on the floor are designed to be touched and lifted. They invite the audience to engage through physical interaction, activating stored sensations and tactile memory.

Here you can view the Exhibition's Handout.