A city, cropped
and restacked into landscape

Sin Geonwu came to painting through media and design. His 2016 bachelor's degree in Media Art & Design at Induk University gave him a grammar of surface, screen, and frame rather than the inherited vocabulary of landscape painting. That origin shows in how he treats the city: not as a view to be rendered, but as material to be edited.

From his earliest solo exhibitions — 〈Self-Funeral〉 (MAKSA, 2016), 〈Walking Narratives〉 (Space55, 2018) — the work moves like a designer's layout: cropping, framing, repeating. The architectural scene is composed in blocks, each one selected and placed, so that the finished image reads as a constructed proposition about the city rather than a transcription of it.

By 〈Architectural Landscape〉 (YOONION ART SPACE, 2021), the building had become his explicit subject. The structures are not backdrops for human narrative; they are the narrative — stacked, mirrored, and cut to expose the logic of how a contemporary city is assembled.

The 2022 exhibition 〈Cropped City〉 (Gallery Onui, Seoul) names the method. To crop is to choose an edge — to decide where the world stops. Sin Geonwu's canvases take that editorial cut as their first gesture: a fragment of the city is severed from its context and set on its own terms.

What follows the cut is reassembly. The cropped blocks are restacked, sometimes mirrored, sometimes repeated, into a landscape that holds together by composition rather than by geography. The result is a city you recognize without being able to locate — a place built from the grammar of urban form rather than from any single street.

The frame thus carries the argument. By making the crop visible — by letting the cut be felt as a cut — the series asks how much of what we call “the city” is already a matter of framing: of what the camera, the developer, the map chooses to include and discard.

His 2022 exhibition 〈DUAL: The Artwork in the Age of Self-Replication〉 (BGM Gallery, Lotte World Tower) turns the question of reproduction onto the work itself. If the contemporary city is built from repetition — the same tower, the same template, the same façade copied block by block — then what does an original painting of that city mean?

The retro and dystopian registers he had already explored in 〈RETRO〉 (Coutances Art Center, 2019) and 〈Destroy the Distopia〉 (Monthly, 2018) return here as the affective tone of self-replication: nostalgia for an origin that may never have existed, and dread of a future that is only more of the same. The city duplicates and discards itself, and the painting records both the duplication and the discard.

With the 2024 exhibition 〈The Banal Is the New〉 (Dalcheon Art Creation Space), the wager sharpens: in an age where everything is reproduced, the banal — the repeated, the templated, the ordinary block of the city — is precisely where the new must be found. It is a structural, unsentimental position, and it is the through-line of his practice.