Buk-Seoul Museum of Art has launched its Artist Research series in the second half of 2025, the exhibitions Unfinished Flora―Soyo Lee and Time Blooms―Anna Ridler explore artistic worlds delicately assembled through imaginative processes that span diverse fields such as art history, natural history, biology, geography, and artificial intelligence. The artists do not treat research as a mere auxiliary element of creation, but rather as an integral axis―demonstrating how research and artistic practice operate in close interrelation. This axis of research and creation intersects with another axis that emerges when art connects with other disciplines: that of art and scholarship, and art and technology.
Unfinished Flora―Soyo Lee presents a research-based art project by the artist, who has long explored ways to mediate between art and scientific knowledge and to merge artistic and scholarly practices. The exhibition is organized around Notes to 『Illustrations of Joseon Plants: A Selection of Toxic Plants』, a response to the botanical compendium written by Pong-shyup Toh and Hak-chin Shim, who sought to document the flora of Korea through direct observation and collection. The book was part of a larger, ongoing effort to compile a comprehensive flora of Korean Peninsula―an open, evolving body of knowledge continually shaped by researchers of his time and those who followed, and now extended through Lee’s own artistic inquiry. The artist has spent years tracing the transmission of the botanical knowledge recorded in the book, as well as its connection to the formation of living ecosystems beyond its pages. She transforms the plants she has collected and the materials she has studied into installations combining preserved specimens and drawings, adding visual notes to the original text. Through this process, which brings together archival research and field investigation, Lee’s research-based art comes into full view, revealing a meticulous inquiry into how knowledge is produced and shared.
Time Blooms―Anna Ridler delves into the intersection of technology, nature, and art, where critical reflection meets sensorial beauty, and highlights the artist’s research-based practice that has gained recognition for her pioneering use of AI datasets as a medium for creation. The works presented draw inspiration from the 18th-century biologist Carl Linnaeus’s concept of the “flower clock,” telling time through the natural rhythms of plants. Ridler visualizes human-constructed temporal systems, such as the 24-hour day or the calendar year, through the circadian rhythms of flowers that open and shut at specific times. By exploring the relationship between human time and the “nonhuman temporalities” through which other beings perceive and sustain their own cycles, she invites viewers to contemplate alternative ways of understanding the world. This series of works reflect Ridler’s ongoing inquiry as an artist and researcher into the meanings of nature, humanness, perception, and awareness in the digital age.
The two artists’ explorations of knowledge and time, both human-made systems, intersect with their studies of natural orders such as plant ecologies and flowering rhythms, finding form through art. Their practices invite us to reflect on “Planet,” the overarching theme of Seoul Museum of Art’s 2025 exhibition agenda, through the lens of plants―living beings that take root and coexist with humans on this shared Earth. Presenting distinct forms of research-based art that address the relationships between the human and the nonhuman, these exhibitions aim to move beyond an anthropocentric approach to planetary thought. They seek to awaken a “planetary sensibility” that imagines new possibilities of coexistence among the many life forms that together constitute our planet.
