the scene left behind
Gahee Park
Upon entering the exhibition space, the viewer encounters both meticulously ordered images and fragments scattered across the scene. A breath-holding stillness lends a sense of restraint to even the smallest movements. The silence and air that fill the gallery convey a palpable tension, suggesting either the aftermath of an event or the moment just before one unfolds. The exhibition’s title, the scene left behind, introduces this condition of tension. What do these scenes contain? Why, and for what purpose, have they been left behind?
The exhibition resembles the act of looking at something faintly stirring beneath the surface of water. The light refracts across the waves so that the image is never fully clear, yet it approaches with the indistinct presence of a form that is almost within reach. This exhibition brings together the artistic languages of two artists: Ivana Štulić, originally from Croatia and now based in New York, and Jeong In Weon, who is based in Seoul. Notably, both artists use the word “residue” to describe their works.[1] For them, residue is not simply a trace left behind after an event. Rather, it is deliberately captured moment, and the tension within traps us in it. The scenes left as residues suspend us in the time and sensation that they embody.
Bringing together the works of these two artists and allowing them to intersect and accumulate within a single space reflects the direction of FIM, which since its opening in 2024 has consistently introduced emerging artists from Korea and abroad. Through collaborations with overseas galleries, Gallery FIM has continued to organize two-person exhibitions that pair Korean and international artists, allowing their practices to enter into dialogue. the scene left behind extends this trajectory. Within the scenes created by two artists working across different cultural contexts and spheres of practice, one finds a strikingly similar emotional tension. As their distinct artistic languages intersect, they reveal the sensibilities embedded in the scenes’ residue.
Now turn to the paintings of Ivana Štulić, which span the walls of the gallery. She has long focused on delicately depicting the human figure and on capturing the moment just before and after an image appears or fades on the canvas: Consequence (2025), with its shelf strewn with shattered glass shards and disordered objects, and Unboxing (2025), filled with boxes and paper bags whose state—whether being packed or unpacked—can only be determined by its title. Such arrangements of objects and fragments visualize what Štulić calls “fleeting moments of transition,”[2] unstable intervals that exist on the cusp of change. In Expecting (2025), three figures gathered around a table, hands reading, stirring tea, or resting for support, invite the viewer to imagine countless possible narratives. The emphasis on these fleeting transitions is reinforced through her use of canvases scaled to cinematic proportions. By evoking the format of film stills, eliminating unnecessary details, and isolating a moment through cropping, her compositions condense a larger scene into a single fragment, sharpening the viewer’s sensitivity to subtle signs of change. Such moments of transition that usually pass unnoticed in daily life generate psychological tension, awakening a sense of lived experience. In Štulić’s paintings, the delicate interval between what remains and what is about to disappear summons before the viewer both infinite possibilities and stories yet to come.
Jeong In Weon also turns her attention to fleeting moments and emotions that do not crystallize into events. Whereas Štulić captures the instant of change itself, Weon is drawn to what comes just before. She channels into objects the unease that has yet to take shape: tension that seems on the verge of erupting, yet still lies dormant beneath the surface of the everyday. While her earlier works often examined the traces and remnants left in the aftermath of events, in this exhibition she explores the subtle tremors that precede its arrival. Fascinated by how unforeseen, even tragic, events can vanish quickly from daily life while persisting in memory in unspoken ways, she gives form to these invisible intervals and latent feelings through the medium of clay. For Weon, clay absorbs bodily sensation and emotion, while the temporality of ceramics—soft earth hardened by fire into enduring form—embodies the paradox of disappearance and persistence, the nature of memory itself. The works on view convey this tension in tactile ways. cloth (2025),a white cloth cast in cold iron, and Vacuum (2023), shaped from the artist’s own bodily awareness, retain traces of touch while holding within them unseen unease and the energy of residue. They evoke a heightened bodily awareness and a profound emotional weight. For Weon, clay is a medium that translates personal sensation and experience into physical form, inscribing impressions of time as if in relief. For her, ceramics is not merely a medium but a process that produces “the form of an object in which emotion has settled,”[3] a material that carries “a temporality that, rather than disappearing in fire, emerges in a more solid form.”[4] Through this process, the ceramic surface preserves the delicate presence of unease and residue. Emptiness, as if warmth had withdrawn, or the tremor of something imminent, is given form, positioning the viewer at an unstable threshold.
The installation carries this sensibility into the exhibition as a whole. The space unfolds in two parts: at the entrance, works evoking interior scenes greet the viewer, while deeper inside, images and objects emerge that gesture outward. Weon’s p-p.p (2021–2022), for instance, captures the shifting reflections of a rainy view in a car’s side mirror, while Štulić’s Subway (2025), depicting a figure departing on a train, similarly evokes the world beyond. Interior and exterior, before and after, begin to overlap, their tensions and residues gradually intertwining. Within this shared space, the works call to one another, creating a charged atmosphere in which the narrative of an unseen event takes shape. The exhibition shifts from the artists’ evocation of inner emotions and sensibilities to the outward surfaces of the world, where, in the gaps in between, sensations suddenly awaken.
What might appear a chance encounter between the two artists instead feels inevitable, bound by their shared language of “residue.” Working in different media—image and object—they are concerned less with remnants themselves than with the presence of time and sensation that lingers before us. This presence, at once provisional and charged, gestures toward future possibility while holding a tension rooted in the present. In their works, Ivana Štulić and Jeong In Weon present not completed records of events, but images poised on the edge of change. The exhibition offers these suspended moments to viewers, opening an experience of unfinished time—where traces of the past coexist with what has yet to unfold.