There are times I open. map to find a delivery address – a customer who has purchased a work. If the route seems complicated, I pull up street view to get a better look. At first, it’s simple. Confirm the address, locate the building, figure out where to park. But sometimes, I find myself searching for the neighborhood where I used to live. Following those streets, places begin to appear – where I played with friends, where I spent time with family. A road I walked every day. A small market whose name I can no longer remember. A weathered wall. A narrow alley beside a utility pole. Nothing remarkable ever happened there. And yet, I find myself lingering in front of the screen, staying in that time for a long while. The house that no longer exists. The market that became a convenience store. The alley that was widened. Unfamiliar, towering buildings standing where something else once stood. That’s when it becomes clear- these places remain perfectly intact in memory, yet they  are changing faster than almost anything else. 

Heo Hyeon-Sook is an artist who returns to spaces that have disappeared, and spaces that will disappear, and gives them form again. The spaces she paints are not the grand spectacles of a modern city. Not tall buildings or glittering streets- but old houses and alleys, small homes and low-rise buildings, places where people’s lives have settled and stayed for a long time. To her, a neighborhood is not a simply a backdrop. It is the place where was born, grew up, and lived-where countless people built homes, walked familiar paths, and made it through each day. She has watched these urban spaces change for a long time. The ground where children once played with dirt and stones has quietly become concrete. Neighborhoods of small houses have given way to new buildings and apartment towers. The arrival of new spaces is, without question, a new beginning  for someone. But the lives that existed before were not nothing. People lived there. Someone was born in that house. someone walked that alley every single day. someone left that neighborhood carrying a memory that would return to, years later, without warning. Heo Hyeon-Sook draws those memories, one by one, in graphite.

The cities in her work feel less like architecture and more like records of time – time during which people lived. Uneven rooftops. narrow staircases. houses leaning against one another. Paths that wind without clear direction. Within them is a way of living that resists near arrangement. Imperfect, but alive. Worn, but once the most comfortable place someone knew. Destined to disappear –  and yet deserving to be remembered. She walks through these places, observes them, and records them. Rather than transcribing what she sees, she gathers and reconstructs the scenes that remain in memory. And so the cities in her work are cities that once existed – and cities rebuilt inside remembrance. They feel like somewhere you have seen before. They feel like somewhere you have naver been. In that space between the familiar and the unknown, each of us finds ourselves thinking of an old neighborhood of our own. 

She does not speak of loss with regret. Instead, within her work, there is gratitude – for the people who lived their lives with such quiet dedication. She says: nothing lives without effort. Those words stayed with me. A house must have been the same. It stood for a long time. It held people within it. It weathered rain and wind, enduring an entire era of life. And one day, it disappears. 

This exhibition speaks of houses and cities that fade away –  and of the traces of life that remain within them. Not to hold on. But to call those memories back once more. To remember, and speak of them together. The exhibition begins.