Porous City — Where the Wind Comes From featuring Minouk Lim: Coex, Seoul
Porous City –Where the Wind Comes From is a large-scale public exhibition that simultaneously presents works by four contemporary media artists—Ji Hye Yeom, Minouk Lim, Yeondoo Jung, and Chan Sook Choi—across dozens of indoor and outdoor media screens throughout Coex in Seoul.
Transforming screens that are usually occupied by commercial advertisements, the works place unfamiliar rhythms of art onto the cityscape, breaking away from the conventional style of public screens. Beyond simple projection, this project redefines public media façades as spaces of exhibition, underscoring its significance as a collaboration between Arts Council Korea and Coex to establish a sustainable presence of contemporary art in Seoul’s media environment.
The Eleven-Faced Traveler is a reconfiguration of a segment from Lim’s three-channel video East Sea Story (2023–2025), presented in the exhibition Hyper Yellow (Ilmin Museum of Art, 2025). Through the motif of the Eleven-Headed Avalokiteśvara familiar in Northeast Asian Buddhist culture, the work questions the relationship between the city and the community. In Buddhist tradition, the Eleven-Headed Avalokiteśvara embodies compassion and awakening, each expression conveying a different emotional state. In Lim’s animation, however, the deity appears as an ordinary traveler, with flames rising from the backpack in place of a holy aureole. Fire here symbolizes both birth and extinction, much like the journey of life itself.
The eleven-faced traveler resembles us, yet remains an outsider, endlessly racing toward the East Sea—a place both everywhere and nowhere. Passing through pseudo- traditional architecture or sinking dreamlike into water, the traveler is a perpetual tourist, forever misarriving. In a sea where two suns rise, the Statue of Liberty in future Odaiba, Tokyo, turns to face them. At that moment, the traveler reveals yet another face from within their mouth and begins to sing. How do the trauma and unconscious of a multiple, border-crossing being slip beyond the self and participate in the world?
