이상 탄생 120주년 기념전 : 《날개야, 다시 돋아라.》

Yi Sang (1910–1937) stands as one of the most complex and captivating figures in the history of modern Korean literature. Combining the rational logic of an architect with the sensory language of a poet, he dismantled and reconstructed the signs of everyday life. His poems are architectural—words stacked like bricks forming structures rather than sentences. This exhibition reassembles the fragments of his language into visual architecture.

Wings, sprout up again. centers on Yi Sang's representative works—Crow's Eye View, Mirror, and Wings—showing how fragments of language are reborn across visual and sonic layers. Each piece is structured along three axes: "flight and fall," "self and other," and "sign and body." Through light, sound, and rhythm, poetic fragments gain new sensorial lives.

Crow's Eye View portrays a world of coexisting order and chaos. Its divided numbers and broken rhythm expose the rupture of modern rationality while capturing the noise, light, and pulse of urban life through the five senses. Repetitive grids and waves visualize its structure—an avant-garde rebellion against syntax that revealed the autistic anxiety of modern humans. Though controversial, it left an enduring mark on literary modernism.

Mirror explores the tension between self and other through reflection and distortion. Through repetition and non-grammatical syntax, it exposes conflict between the ordinary and the true self. Semi-transparent projections allow viewers to experience the unsettling act of being seen, evoking the pain of self-awareness and blurring the border between dream and reality.

Wings illustrates the collapse and escapism of an alienated intellectual. In his confined room, the protagonist's mental isolation mirrors the breakdown of domestic and social identity. Light and low-frequency sound overlap to suggest the moment of renewal—a metaphor for both colonial despair and self-recovery.

This exhibition, commemorating the 120th anniversary of Yi Sang's birth, interprets his literature as architectural structure. The poetic spaces he built transcend language, asking: "After language, how can art exist?"

Divided into three sections—the first revisiting Yi Sang's life and modern Seoul's archives, the second visualizing text's transformation into matter, and the third creating an immersive space of flight—the exhibition transforms the act of reading into walking.

The motif of "wings" embodies loss and regeneration. The protagonist's fall reflects the disintegration of modern selfhood, while reemerging wings symbolize the recovery of perception and language. The exhibition frames this as a cyclical structure where literature, art, sense, and reason converge.

During his brief life, Yi Sang produced more than forty poems, essays, and architectural drawings. Dubbed the "architectural poet," he built poems with architectural logic and wrote structures with poetic reason. Wings, sprout up again. reinterprets this dual structure through media art, reviving his notion of "thought as form" for the present.

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