For its latest exhibition in Seoul, GALERIE PHILIA continues its mission of situating contemporary design within meaningful architectural and cultural contexts. Over the past decade, Philia has staged exhibitions in sites charged with history and symbolism — from Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse to Oscar Niemeyer’s Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói. Each project affirms the gallery’s curatorial ethos: design is never neutral, but always shaped by place, narrative, and the dialogue it opens across time and culture.
Curated by Ygaël Attali, Philia’s co-founder and art director, this new chapter extends the gallery’s long-standing exploration of sculptural design as a cultural and philosophical language.
In Seoul, in collaboration with MAISON NAVIE, PHILIA presents Human After All, a group exhibition dedicated to a new wave of Korean designers — Jang Hea-Kyoung (FICT Studio), Hyungshin Hwang, Lee Sisan, Saerom Yoon, Studio Chacha (Cha Shin-sil), and Min Seon Kong. Their practices are diverse yet united by a shared impulse: to push beyond function toward sculptural presence, to explore materiality as a language, and to articulate a distinctly Korean sensibility within the global landscape of collectible design.
The chosen venue powerfully amplifies this curatorial intention. Originally built as a public bathhouse in the 1980s and later converted into a church, the building embodies cycles of use, memory, and reinvention. Its vertical core, spanning from basement to skylit roof, channels natural light through raw concrete textures, creating an atmosphere both sacred and cinematic. In this context, the works are not simply displayed but staged within a layered architectural narrative: a vessel of memory and transformation that mirrors the designers’ own exploration of material metamorphosis.
PHILIA’s curation emphasizes the affinities between space and work. The concrete rhythms of the building resonate with the textured geometries of Hyungshin Hwang’s layered forms; the light cascading from above mirrors the iridescent surfaces of Saerom Yoon’s chromatic pieces; the rawness of the structure parallels Lee Sisan’s dialogue between natural and artificial matter; while the intimacy of the upper levels invites encounters with the subtle material experiments of Studio Chacha and the organic sensitivity of Min Seon Kong. In Jang Hea-Kyoung’s craft-driven reinterpretations, we sense the same tension that defines the venue: between utility and transcendence, between the everyday and the monumental.
Human After All marks the first chapter of a trilogy developed by Galerie Philia across Asia this year, exploring the evolving relationship between the human and the machine in contemporary design. Following Seoul, subsequent exhibitions in Shenzhen and Tokyo will extend this inquiry across distinct cultural and technological contexts, examining how designers negotiate craftsmanship, digital processes, and material intelligence within an increasingly hybrid creative landscape.
Through Human After All, PHILIA seeks to illuminate how Korean design today navigates its position at the crossroads of tradition and innovation. These designers honor craftsmanship while embracing technology, draw from cultural memory yet speak to a global audience, and create objects of use that equally aspire to be poetic presences. By placing them within this raw and resonant architectural frame, and under the curatorial direction of Ygaël Attali, Philia reaffirms its commitment to design as a form of cultural storytelling — transcultural, transformative, and profoundly human.