The figure that has truly awakened is not the one left standing but the headless body fallen before it: the reversal Koesy stages across two sculptures in Eureka, the opening show of a new basement gallery in Seoul.
In the neighbourhood where Koesy grew up, the word Eureka was everywhere. It is normally the cry of a sudden discovery. For him it drifted into something else over the years, and that is the version this show takes up.
The turn came from the manga Koesy read as a child, where heroes often woke only after surrendering some part of themselves, never at the moment they gained anything. He found another Eureka inside that paradox and built the show around it. Two figures hold the room. One stands upright, as if its awakening is already behind it; the other lies prostrate before it, stripped of its head. “Yet in this world, it is the fallen figure who has truly awakened,” MO's exhibition text reads.
Gone with its head are the face and the name that used to prove its identity, and the ego that set it at the centre of everything. Its marked, defeated body reads less as ruin than as a crossing into some other state, reached precisely by giving things up. The irezumi covering it refuses to settle into one meaning: protective or menacing, reverent or boastful, depending on who is reading it. “Symbols endure even as times change, but their meanings inevitably transform,” the gallery writes.
Koesy came to sculpture sideways. Born in Ulsan and based in Seoul, with no formal training, he spent years in 3D graphics before he wanted to touch the forms that had only ever existed on a screen. He likens making to walking with no destination in mind, and resists pinning his work to any single meaning. MO sets it all in the space between the imagined and the real, between what is lost and what is won back, reading his digital work and his sculptures as inner unease pushed into form. He mentions one thing the wall text omits, a small jinx from his own childhood that the piece carries too.
Eureka is the first exhibition at MO, a basement space in Hannam-dong, on view from 19 September to 11 October 2026. MO's text ends on the fallen figure's cry of Eureka, “Not the cry of one who has discovered something, but of one who, having lost something, has finally become free.”
