Bringing together artists represented by seven Korean emerging galleries, Second Nature explores ways of representing and making sense of a world that often exceeds our capacity to comprehend it, particularly in times of profound uncertainty. Running through works that move between the natural and the artificial, the material and the symbolic, the rational and the mysterious is a desire to orient ourselves towards something larger than the individual: to believe in, invoke or make tangible forces that cannot be fully seen or understood.

Ritual and spiritual forms offer ways of investing objects, images and gestures with meaning or power, as do, perhaps less obviously, the technologies and systems that increasingly mediate our experience of the world. Their complexity and opacity can lend them something of the magical: we depend on processes whose workings remain largely inaccessible, much as we invest objects and images with forces beyond what is immediately visible. What appears rational and what appears mystical may therefore be less opposed than they seem.

Ritual iconographies, myths, vernacular objects, techniques, and materials—some with specific histories in Korea—surface here within a visual field so densely mediated and recombined that their origins are no longer easily legible. Rather than remaining intact inheritances, they are recoded and returned to circulation alongside speculative relics, artificial forms of life, transformed tools, and accelerated streams of images. Across these encounters, Second Nature traces how forms of belief persist, mutate, and re-emerge within contemporary visual and technological culture, and how material, symbolic, and technological systems become ways of navigating what exceeds our immediate understanding. Perhaps it is precisely when the world becomes hardest to read that we begin, once again, to look for what lies beyond it.