Yongguk Ko’s second solo exhibition is titled “Nap.” It is the same title as his first solo exhibition, held in Germany last year. Both are called Nap, with the Roman numeral II appended to the same word in the second exhibition. In the introductory text for the first exhibition, the identity of the word “Nap” was interpreted as a “state of emptiness and self-forgetfulness.” In that text, Solveig Schaper, writing about Ko’s practice, which begins with the collection of discarded objects, discerned representations of “sleeping beings”: “Having lost both their owners and their functions, they no longer know what they once were or what they were made for. They are in ‘NAP’—a state of emptiness and self-forgetfulness.”

Looking quietly at photographs of the striking interior of the first Nap (2025), in which achromatic objects were laid out in silence across a dark gray exhibition floor, one might suddenly conjure up the enigmatic remains of some archaeological site where all vertical forms have collapsed and even their traces have been worn away. Rather than a single, clearly delineated historical moment, the scene draws the gaze toward something beneath the ground: a horizontal landscape that appears paradoxically flat, composed of layers of different bodily times superimposed upon one another, fragments of a vast historical temporality that no single human body could ever encompass. Beneath the feet, the bleached-white objects are cast in faint shadows by exceptionally white fluorescent light, which delineates only the contours of these objects suspended in a state of self-forgetfulness. Between the pupil opened toward the darkness beneath the earth and the languid eyes loosened beneath the white fluorescent light, the gaze that had wandered between the two seems to come to an abrupt halt before these traces of arrested time. Like someone not yet fully awake, one might experience alongside them a vast, empty self-forgetfulness, enveloped by an immense expanse of time and space.

Not only the exhibition title, but also the enigmatic circumstances surrounding the found objects and transformed structures titled Untitled, as well as the anthropomorphized forms made of recycled fabric called Flower, continue from Nap into Nap II (2026). Despite this close connection, I cannot shake the thought that the temporal interval between the two exhibitions may have been filled by a larger void, one that lies beyond the capacity of my two eyes to measure. Perhaps this is because of the unfamiliar anxiety summoned by sleep—an act that remains concealed, even from me. Through sleep, and especially through the act of napping, Ko gauges the realm of the unconscious, a world specifically associated with dreams. It is also open toward death, which touches one side of life, and becomes an enigmatic stage where memories exiled from reality confront one another.

In the early twentieth century, explorations into the concealed world of the unconscious began among those who experienced a void within reality in the aftermath of war. Among them, the Surrealists were particularly preoccupied with reviving memories sleeping within obsolete objects left behind in the real world. The German photographer Hans Bellmer, for instance, evoked the fetishistic desires concealed within severed (artificial) bodies through his photographic series Die Puppe (The Doll, 1934), produced during the Surrealist period. In some respects, Ko’s Flower series brings Bellmer’s dolls to mind. Just as Bellmer combined parts of various dolls and fragments of objects with adhesive materials to create strange new dolls, Ko collects old dolls that once belonged to someone, erases their original forms by dismantling them into a state closer to raw material, dyes the separate parts in the same color, and binds and stitches them together over new skeletons made of wire, transforming them once again into doll-like figures approximating the human form. He then gives these anthropomorphized forms the name Flower.

In Nap II, the Flower series (2024–), consisting of 28 installations, carries this history within it. Whereas the achromatic forms spread out like a single scene in the first exhibition seemed to reveal the silent surface of a sleeping reality, the landscape led before our eyes by the “nap” in this exhibition is closer to a stage beyond reality, with its curtain drawn aside. The exhibition space is broadly divided into three sections. Upon entering the space filled with the Flower series, one might imagine small human sculptures lying neatly within an unknown cave. One might even try to gauge the gaze of prehistoric humans who, at some moment before history, picked up a fist-sized piece of limestone from a pile of stones on the floor of a cave, imagined within it the blurred figure of a sleeping human being, and carved into it a small human figure resembling their own body.

In this sense, Ko’s Flower series once again evokes the primordial human impulse to imagine human figures inhabiting objects. Tens of thousands of years ago, nomadic people temporarily settled in unfamiliar lands and, in the darkness of caves, chipped away fragments of rocks of unknown origin to give form to something resembling themselves—a “human figure.” If, as the account of Genesis tells us, God created humanity by shaping clay in His own image, then the image of God, which cannot itself be represented, ultimately leads to a visual “absence.” From this perspective, humanity’s primordial imagination toward the origin of the human figure might be understood as an intense unconscious longing for this absence. By focusing on the state of a fetishistic object—the doll—in which the desire for possession has been erased, Ko transforms an almost discarded old doll back into a state of matter prior to form, like soft clay or a stone, thereby reviving the sculptor’s gaze that imagines an arbitrary, absent figure. It is a state of merger that cannot be wholly separated between hallucination and awakening, mediated by sleep.

From the outset, Ko’s imperfectly formed human beings in Flower simultaneously seek to resemble something and move incessantly toward a dissolution that flees from any fixed form. This contradiction may ultimately originate in a sense of loss toward an originary form that can never be fully represented. The word that rises to the tongue upon encountering Untitled (2024–2026), which catches the eye at the entrance to the second-floor exhibition space, is “absence.” Nothingness. The absence of something.

A semicircular glass display case stands empty, yet what catches the eye even more quickly than its emptiness is the bright light illuminating its interior. The light creates a white thickness within the empty space of the display case, making visible the dust accumulated on the transparent glass and the erased traces that appear as its negative. This visual experience—the possibility of visually approaching things that are invisible—allows us to sense absence itself. On top of the old glass display case, now endowed with a white thickness, lies a soiled white cloth. It too entangles itself with various materials, allowing us to sense a boundary between life and death, in which an object returns to the state of matter.

The basement exhibition space of Nap II is, like the old glass display case, seemingly empty within, an invisible realm in which one becomes acutely conscious of the irregularly positioned stairs, columns, and walls. Ko has placed several drawings here, along with a long bench on which visitors may sit. Having long produced images based on a surreal imagination, as if drawing the world of dreams, he densely fills sheets of paper with repetitive lines, attaches star-shaped stickers, or draws cross-like forms according to geometric rules. In this way, he leaves behind ambiguous situations somewhere between triangles and mountains, between mountains and sky. They seem to contain a narrative while remaining enigmatic; they appear to possess form even as the image itself seems to disappear. Like a collector of images who continually challenges the impossibility of representation, he becomes, in this way, a modern-day Sisyphus, eternally struggling against death.

Nap II visualizes the enigmatic void between form and matter, life and death, awakening and hallucination, like the merging of day and night. It does so through an imagination concerned with sensing that white thickness. Consider the measuring rods that Ko placed alongside unknown found objects in the first Nap, using them to measure the scale of things. In Nap II, those rods function as material components of the human figure. As if they have emerged from within the white glass display case, from atop the long bench, and from among the small doll-like human figures of imprisoned form, they now stand behind a white screen in the guise of “an awakening from sleep”—the first human being.