The Lost Garden of Heaven is the first solo show in Korea by renowned international artist Andrea Galvani. The exhibition is a monumental immersion that coalesces around time—more fractal than linear. Described by the artist as “an experiential landscape,” the gallery is transformed into an immersive colorful forest—14 botanical towers composed by life-size, artisanal ceramic replicas of lost and extinct heirloom apples, carefully reproduced through studies of historical agricultural records. Celebrating the revival of these vital plants, Galvani worked with farmers, ecologists, pomologists, horticulturalists, historians, and “apple hunters” to replicate hundreds of rare and extinct varieties through his sculptures. The Lost Garden of Heaven tells a profound story of cultural exchange, Indigenous ethnobotany, stewardship, the fragility and resilience of our living planet.

 

The exhibition is anchored by The Void Migrates to the Surface [Blue Morpho]—a powerful videosculptural installation that brings visitors into a deeper dimension of time. Galvani extends the brief lives of one rare and endangered butterfly species—from just a few weeks to 73 years, the global average human life expectancy. Using advanced super-slow motion technology capable of capturing up to 1 million frames per second, the artist dilates time with precision—stretching seconds into minutes and aligning the lifespan of butterflies with that of human beings. Reverberating throughout the entire architecture, Galvani’s audio installation Resurrection I reanimates melancholic, hauntingly beautiful birdsongs and calls from seven bird species that went extinct between 1907 and 1999. The exhibition is constituted by a state of absence more permanent than death.

 

Rising like a constellation, Study on Omega-Minus, Galvani’s neon sculpture, traces one of the most important discoveries in quantum physics from the last century. Like a luminous map reminiscent of sinuous vegetal forms, the work charts the first observance of the omega-minus particle—a revolution that shaped our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of matter and nature’s underlying symmetries. Using technology, simulacra of nature, Galvani builds a new cosmology. The Lost Garden of Heaven takes on a clear political, philosophical, and existential direction—life is an event that embodies time in a continuous natural flow, without perimeters.

 

Developed over three years, The Lost Garden of Heaven crystallizes Galvani's extensive research and production between Mexico, Peru, and the United States with the collaboration of major institutions including the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics and Macaulay Library at Cornell University, McGuire Center for Lepidoptera & Biodiversity, and the American Museum of Natural History. It was made possible with the generous support of The Shifting Foundation, Los Angeles.