Galerie Philia presents Saerom Yoon’s suspended resin landscapes at Art Busan

Curated by Ygaël Attali, Day, Suspended marked Galerie Philia’s presentation at Art Busan, which unfolded from May 21 – 24, 2026, as a contemplative solo exhibition by Korean designer Saerom Yoon. Presented at Booth D-2 in the BEXCO Exhibition Center in Busan, South Korea, the project explored how material can hold memory, atmosphere and duration simultaneously.

Rather than staging a conventional presentation of collectible objects, the design exhibition extended Galerie Philia’s longstanding curatorial approach—one that positions design as a relational field between form, perception and space. Here, the works emerged less as autonomous pieces and more as fragments within a perceptual environment, where visibility itself becomes unstable and continually negotiated.

“Rooted in Philia’s curatorial approach—one that understands design not as object, but as a field of relations between form, space, and experience—the exhibition is conceived as a perceptual environment rather than a presentation of discrete works. What is at stake is not the visibility of objects, but the conditions through which they appear,” the gallery states in a press release.

Trained initially in woodworking and furniture design, Yoon’s practice has gradually shifted away from ideas of construction toward states of suspension and dissolution. Through layered resin compositions, he develops forms that appear simultaneously present and withdrawn, as though partially submerged within their own material depth.

Day, Suspended brought together works from the A Piece of One Day series alongside elements from the Crystal Series, establishing a dialogue between translucency, vertical rhythm and chromatic density. Across these bodies of work, colour is embedded deep within successive layers of resin, gradually revealed through changing light and prolonged viewing.

At the exhibition’s centre were the Pray sculptures—vertically stacked forms composed through repeated geometric segments. Rather than functioning as singular monolithic objects, the works unfold rhythmically, almost architecturally, introducing a measured cadence into the exhibition space. Their translucent materiality destabilises any sense of weight or permanence, giving the impression that the sculptures have accumulated slowly over time rather than being conventionally assembled.

In contrast, the wall-based works operated more like perceptual fields than fixed images. Soft gradients emerge from within cloudy, milky surfaces, resisting immediate legibility. Depending on the viewer’s movement and angle, contours appear, dissolve and reform, making perception itself part of the work’s temporal structure.

Yoon’s Crystal Series extended this material investigation into the territory of functional design. Consoles and tables retained precise structural clarity while appearing almost dematerialised under shifting light conditions. Their resin volumes refract and absorb surrounding illumination, producing subtle chromatic variations throughout the day. Function remains present, though secondary to the experiential atmosphere each object generates.

Day, Suspended came about as a spatial composition of resonances, between density and disappearance, object and atmosphere, memory and material. Each work existed relationally, shaped as much by proximity and movement as by form itself. “What emerges is not a set of autonomous pieces, but a condition: a suspended moment in which time, memory, and matter briefly coincide,” as the gallery mentions.