Installation View of Empty Garden - A Liminoid Journey to Nowhere in Somewhere at university church of st mary the virgin, 2020.
Empty Garden | Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Empty Garden: A Liminoid Journey to Nowhere in Somewhere, Jinjoon Lee’s DPhil dissertation from the University of Oxford, has been formally acquired for the permanent collection of the Ashmolean Museum in the UK. Founded in 1683, the Ashmolean is widely recognized as the world’s first university museum, and this acquisition marks a rare instance in which contemporary artistic research originating in Korea enters the framework of an international public collection.
Produced in the form of a ten-metre Korean paper scroll, Empty Garden is both a work and a study that reconsiders the Joseon literati concept of the uiwon—an imagined or inward garden—within the conditions of today’s digital environment. Set against an era structured by AI and data, the project asks how human sensation, memory, and reflection might be reactivated beyond systems driven by speed and efficiency. In this context, Lee proposes “Data Gardening” as a relational mode of engaging data: not as something merely accumulated or processed, but as something tended to, cultivated, and experienced over time.
Here, form is not secondary to content but integral to the argument itself. As the reader moves along the scroll, the act of reading becomes a spatial and bodily experience, recalling the movement of wandering through an East Asian garden. Empty Garden thus operates not only as a dissertation, but also as a spatial work in which reading, movement, reflection, and perception remain inseparable. Its inclusion in the Ashmolean’s permanent collection points to the growing recognition of Korean artistic and humanistic research as part of a longer public legacy of knowledge, preservation, and interpretation.
Produced in the form of a ten-metre Korean paper scroll, Empty Garden is both a work and a study that reconsiders the Joseon literati concept of the uiwon—an imagined or inward garden—within the conditions of today’s digital environment. Set against an era structured by AI and data, the project asks how human sensation, memory, and reflection might be reactivated beyond systems driven by speed and efficiency. In this context, Lee proposes “Data Gardening” as a relational mode of engaging data: not as something merely accumulated or processed, but as something tended to, cultivated, and experienced over time.
Here, form is not secondary to content but integral to the argument itself. As the reader moves along the scroll, the act of reading becomes a spatial and bodily experience, recalling the movement of wandering through an East Asian garden. Empty Garden thus operates not only as a dissertation, but also as a spatial work in which reading, movement, reflection, and perception remain inseparable. Its inclusion in the Ashmolean’s permanent collection points to the growing recognition of Korean artistic and humanistic research as part of a longer public legacy of knowledge, preservation, and interpretation.
March 26, 2026
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