Pierre Huyghe
Liminal
Leeum Museum of Art

French multimedia artist Pierre Huyghe has teased Western art audiences for decades, repeatedly probing the nature of reality via puzzling environments and enigmatic hybrid artworks such as Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt) (2012), a reclining concrete female nude with an active beehive for a head. “Liminal,” which presented 12 works at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, was his first solo exhibition in Asia. Spanning 2013–24, the selection originally appeared at the 60th Venice Biennale last year in an official collateral show, co-developed by the Pinault Collection and the Leeum Museum. At the Punta della Dogana, as in Korea, the artist’s preoccupation with the interface between the human and nonhuman prompted many questions, though not always the ones he intended.

Like Genesis, this survey—conceived by Huyghe in collaboration with independent curator Anne Stenne—began in darkness. Emerging first from the void, Zoodram 4 (2011) is an illuminated aquarium containing a hermit crab living inside a hollow replica of Constantin Brâncuși’s bronze sculpture Sleeping Muse (1910), the pair emblematic of Huyghe’s obsession with human artifice vis-à-vis the natural world.