Gwon Osang’s SCULPTURE CENTER 4/4 at PS ROY in Seoul

PS ROY a project space operated by ROY Gallery Seoul, presents SCULPTURE CENTER 4/4 by Gwon Osang, curated by ROY Gallery, through July 30, 2026.

Before photography, a building accumulated weight. Columns bore loads, stone held its own mass, ornament was applied but legible as surface. When buildings became photographed, they began to exist in two states at once, material and image, singular and reproduced indefinitely.

The work at PS ROY takes that doubled state as its method, not as metaphor.

It asks what happens when you build from the image-form of architecture rather than from architecture itself, and what kind of space results when the photograph replaces the stone.

Gwon Osang draws from photographs that already existed of a place, fragments from different angles and different years, and commits them to a fixed arrangement. The result is a building that could not have been seen from any single position in the original.

Inside Deodorant Type, covers all five surfaces of PS ROY's exhibition cube, ceiling, floor, and three walls.

Gwon's method, developed over two decades, adheres printed photographs to lightweight iso-pink foam and finishes them with resin, a material chosen for its near-weightlessness, holding the appearance of mass without carrying any.

The source is the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, the ornate 1908 concert hall designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner. Gwon did not travel there. The images came from online archives and a VR rendering captured from Google Maps in the early 2000s, when the building already existed on the internet as navigable digital space.

PS ROY is a compact project space in Apgujeong, Gangnam, Seoul. It is small enough that a work covering its five surfaces fully encloses the visitor, yet large enough to hold the implied scale of what it references.

This exhibition marks the final chapter of a yearlong collaboration between the gallery and the artist. The cube-shaped interior, 369 cm high, is the armature. The room is not the site of the sculpture. It is the sculpture.

Inside the cube, organ pipes appear at the far wall. Balcony tiers extend on both sides, compressed and bent. A stained-glass dome sits above, fragmentary and warm in color. Sections of mosaic and decorative column capitals appear beside ceiling fragments photographed from entirely different positions and times.

The panels meet at angles that do not correspond to the original geometry. The joins are visible. This is not a failure of illusion. The work makes clear that it was assembled, that each fragment came from a different moment. The resin surface catches light differently from actual stone. Close up, the edge of a panel reveals the foam beneath.

Three preparatory esquisses accompany the main piece. At that scale the fragmentation reads differently, more provisional, the choices more exposed. Their presence holds a separate pressure, the record of decision before commitment, the early 2000s origin of a project that took two more decades to reach full scale.

The Palau de la Música Catalana is one of the most photographed building interiors in the world. Its ornament generates images continuously across platforms and years, each with its own angle and light condition. Gwon selects from this abundance and commits to an arrangement.

At a moment when photographic archives have become substantial enough to substitute for physical experience of most places, the work arrives grounded in the specific, images adhered to foam, in a room at a fixed address in Seoul, viewable only in person.

At night, the PS ROY interior on Apgujeong-ro glows from within. Seen from the street through the large aperture at its front face, the interior of the Palau de la Música Catalana is visible, compressed, assembled, luminous. The actual Palau seats over two thousand people. What is visible here holds it in a space you enter alone. Both are real. Neither is the same as the other.

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