2026 Cheongju Art Studio Relay Project Solo Exhibition

Cheongju Art Studio presents the 2026 Relay Project Solo Exhibition, a series of exhibitions showcasing the creative outcomes produced by its fourteen 20th-residency artists during their residency. Running from July 30 to December 30, 2026, the project unfolds over seven sequential exhibitions. The fourth exhibition in the series features Kim Yeonjae​​ and is titled The Ones Who Walk Away.​

 

 

A perfect world exists in an unreachable place. If it is unreachable, all that remains is the act of departing toward it. Ursula K. Le Guin's short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas portrays the backs of those who turn away from a deceptive utopia and leave. Where did the maps held by those who left Omelas lead? Treading familiar paths and passing through the known world, where did they walk to? How did they feel when they woke up the morning after their adventure ended? Even if the destination is uncertain, daring to embark on an adventure in a better direction is the only journey that brings us closer to the rainbow.

 

The reason the first pages of countless sci-fi and fantasy novels are filled with topographies of virtual worlds is that maps aid in taking unhesitating steps toward unvisited places. However, this expression of curiosity to explore unknown territories and this language of reverie is simultaneously a political medium that enforces a center. Today, we can zoom in on a small yard on the other side of the globe through map applications, but technological transparency does not equate to political visibility. This gap becomes evident when we confront the reality where certain regions are left unmarked on the map and the lives and memories of certain communities are erased.

 

The exhibition The Ones Who Walk Away is an exploration of the point where real-world politics and escapism intersect, specifically through the concepts of utopia and cartography. It is also an exercise in acknowledging the limitation that no matter how unfamiliar the imagination is, it can never completely escape the boundaries of the known world. While erasing existing world structures, physical borders, and centrality, I have drawn upon imaginations that are only possible upon that very ground. Acknowledging that these imaginations can never stray far from the known world, I have woven together the relentless attempts to nevertheless create something that has never existed.

 

Even the most radical imagination always routes through reality. When depicting extraterrestrial life, it relies on variations of Earth's ecosystem, and when designing a new social system, it borrows from preexisting power structures or cultural frameworks. Because earthly senses, human perception, and familiar grammars recur even as we illustrate unprecedented dimensions, all creation is essentially bound within a massive cliché. In the grammar of the sci-fi and fantasy genre, a cliché is an implicit collaboration built over time between author and reader. Embracing this long-standing agreement, the exhibition aims to scatter across the space the heirs, illegitimate offspring, mutants, and strangers born from this collective communication process that endlessly creates variations upon the structures of our given world and language.