In Ground, a new permanent installation at South Korea’s Museum SAN, sculptor Antony Gormley and architect Tadao Ando ask visitors to descend—both physically and emotionally—into a space where presence is everything and time appears to stretch.
This is the first collaboration between the two artists, and their intentions are as closely woven as the site itself. Beneath a manicured flower garden, a modest concrete entryway gives way to a spiral staircase. What awaits below is a vast, dome-shaped volume: raw, elemental, and astonishingly serene. Not an escape from nature, but a chamber attuned to it.
Ando’s architecture—usually rigorous and sheltering—takes on a porous quality here. A circular oculus at the dome’s peak lets in sunlight, rain, and the occasional echo of birdsong. A wide arched opening pulls in the ridgelines of the surrounding mountains. Light plays off concrete; air moves freely. Nothing about the space is ornamental, yet everything feels intentional.
The installation’s focal point is Gormley’s seven rust-toned “Blockworks” figures. Formed from stacked iron blocks into abstracted human postures, they appear crouched, supine, cross-legged—each one a kind of pause in space. Their surfaces are alive with oxidation, the metal responding slowly to wind and moisture. Here, decay becomes a form of communication. Time, a collaborator.
But it’s the negative space that does the talking. These sculptures don’t occupy the dome so much as activate it. The emptiness between them invites attention inward. There is no narrative, only an invitation to reflect: on one's own stance, one's breath, one’s location in the larger terrain of being.
Gormley’s concurrent exhibition in the museum’s main hall, Drawing on Space, continues the inquiry with a broader reach. Steel sculptures in Liminal Field sketch the boundaries of the body in orbit-like outlines. A drawing rendered in the artist’s own blood pulses with physical immediacy. Each work feels like an extension of the central question posed in Ground: how do we live in this body, on this earth, in this time?
This dual presentation reinforces Gormley’s lifelong commitment to sculpture as more than form. His materials—iron, steel, blood—are never neutral. They resist polish, favoring entropy, transformation. They speak to the body as both object and origin. The viewer is never passive. In Gormley’s world, you are always part of the work.
Ando, too, is at his most distilled. The dome’s modesty reads as a kind of architectural haiku: curved lines, quiet light, raw concrete. The restraint allows for resonance. This is not a monument to ego, but to shared consciousness—between site and structure, body and void.
With Ground, Museum SAN strengthens its reputation as a destination for art that engages with elemental questions. Since its opening in 2013 in the forested mountains of Gangwon Province, the museum has offered not spectacle but slowness, not declarations but dialogues.
