The seen and the hidden,
held in a transparent sphere
Glass, crystal spheres, translucent structures — ornament beside violence.A geometry where order and instability are placed side by side.
A transparent geometry —
ornament beside violence
Salnus is a Seoul-based emerging artist working across painting, drawing, installation, and animation, with a recent practice centered on painting and drawing. Having graduated from Hongik University's Department of Textile Art and Fashion Design in 2013, the artist has experimented widely with medium, moving between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, between narrative and structure.
The work repeatedly takes up geometric structures, transparent objects, spheres and circular forms, and transformed images of the body. Voyeurism, the grotesque, and the relationship between the seen and the hidden are its principal themes. Through transparent materials — glass, crystal spheres, translucent structures — and a geometric vocabulary, Salnus juxtaposes ornament with violence, order with instability.
Painting and installation, the flat and the volumetric, narrative and structure: the work crosses freely between them. In the recent series The Story of a Snake That Followed the Bead, Salnus weaves an entire exhibition space into a single narrative structure — not a sequence of discrete works, but a sensory yet structural whole carrying a slight instability.
Major themes
- 1
The seen and the hidden
Voyeurism and the grotesque — the relationship between showing and concealing runs through the work as its central question.
- 2
Transparent spheres & geometry
Glass, crystal spheres, and translucent structures in geometric form — ornament and violence, order and instability, held in a single transparent tension.
- 3
Space as narrative structure
Crossing between painting and installation, flat and volumetric — the recent series weaves an entire exhibition space into one narrative structure.
Solo exhibitions
- 2025《Digging Out》, Rounded Flat, Seoul
- 2024《Bad Taste》, Gallery Moss, Seoul
- 2022《The Tale of the Ring Worm》, Peace & Culture Bunker; 《Painted-Over Zone》, Goyang Aram Nuri; 《Entrance》, Gallery Cafe Gaje
- 2021《Fragments of the Screen》, Horanggasy Creative Studio, Gwangju; 《Generative Garden — A Gaze Beyond the Focus》, Wumin Art Center, Cheongju
- 2020《Generative Garden》, Goyang Aram Nuri Museum of Art / Yeongcheon Art Studio
- 2018《It Does Not Feel Bad》, Gallery Bincan
- 2014《Counter-Pursuit》, Gallery Gaia, Seoul
Education & residencies
- BFA, Dept. of Textile Art & Fashion Design, College of Fine Arts, Hongik University (2013)
- Resident artist, Peace & Culture Bunker, 5th cohort (2022)
- Resident artist, Horanggasy Creative Studio, 7th cohort (2021)
- Resident artist, Yeongcheon Art Studio, 12th cohort (2020)
Three essays —
on transparency and its tension
1The seen and the hidden — voyeurism and the grotesque
Salnus's work returns again and again to a single relationship: that between the seen and the hidden. Voyeurism and the grotesque are not subject matter so much as a way of looking — an attention to what a surface reveals and what it withholds. A transparent object promises full disclosure and then refuses it; a translucent structure shows the body within while distorting it.
That refusal is where the work lives. Transformed images of the body recur, neither fully exposed nor fully concealed, held in a state of tension between the two. The result is a charged ambiguity in which looking itself becomes a question — what right do we have to see, and what does the seen withhold from us in return?
2Transparent spheres — ornament beside violence
Glass, crystal spheres, and translucent structures supply the material vocabulary. The sphere and the circular form recur as a structuring motif — a lens, an eye, an enclosure. Set within a geometric order, these transparent materials carry a doubleness: they are decorative, even seductive, and at the same time hard, edged, capable of harm.
Salnus places ornament and violence side by side, refusing to resolve them into one another. Order and instability are held in the same frame. The geometry that promises stability is undercut by a slight, deliberate unsteadiness, so that the work never settles into mere pattern — it stays alert, sensory, on edge.
3The Story of a Snake That Followed the Bead — space as narrative
Across painting, drawing, installation, and animation, Salnus moves between the flat and the volumetric, between narrative and structure. The two- dimensional surface is never only a surface; the installation is never only an object. Each crosses into the territory of the other.
The recent series The Story of a Snake That Followed the Bead carries this crossing to its conclusion. Rather than hanging discrete works on a wall, Salnus weaves an entire exhibition space into a single narrative structure — a path to be followed, like a snake after a bead. The viewer does not simply look at the work; the viewer moves through it, and the movement is part of the meaning.
Salnus joins this campaign not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity — so that those navigating financial exclusion today might find a way through.
From textile and fashion design to a transparent geometry of spheres and bodies, Salnus's work pursues a single question: what is it to see, and to be seen? The answer is a practice that keeps ornament and violence, order and instability, in unresolved tension — and turns an entire room into the body of a story.
Selected Works
1 works are featured here.
Salnus joined this campaign in solidarity with fellow artists. Every work sold flows directly into the artists' mutual-aid loan fund— a purchase becomes the next month's lifeline for an artist navigating financial exclusion today.
