INSTALLATION VIEW, UNIVERSITY CHURCH OF ST MARY THE VIRGIN, OXFORD, 2020.
Empty Garden | Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Empty Garden – A Liminoid Journey to Nowhere in Somewhere (2020), Jinjoon Lee’s dissertation for the DPhil, University of Oxford, has been acquired by the Ashmolean Museum for its permanent collection. Founded in 1683, the Ashmolean is recognized as the world’s first university museum and one of the foundational institutions of Western intellectual history. This marks the first time that this venerable institution, whose holdings include works by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, has acquired a living artist’s doctoral dissertation and the work of a contemporary Korean artist.
Produced as a 10-meter Korean paper scroll, Lee’s work reconsiders the Joseon literati concept of uiwon—an imagined garden—within today’s digital environment. In an era structured by AI and data, the work questions 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.
Produced as a 10-meter Korean paper scroll, Lee’s work reconsiders the Joseon literati concept of uiwon—an imagined garden—within today’s digital environment. In an era structured by AI and data, the work questions 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.
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 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 larger public legacy of knowledge, preservation, and interpretation.
March 26, 2026
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