Participating artists:Joachim Blank, Sonya Egorova, Marie Charlotte Elsner, Naomi Frank, Li Huhn, Laila Kamil, Niklas Kleemann, Samuel Kok, Clemens Körner, Franziska Kühn, Snow Paik, Sophie Charlotte von Rintelen, Pascal Schiffers, Marie Seelen, Einav Zeichner, Siyan Zhang, Yana Zschiedrich, Kwon Woo-jae, Kim Seo-yeon, Kim Yoon-young, Viktoriia Ermolaeva, Lee Seo-hyeon
Period (opening hours):Fri, Sat, Sun / closed Sept 25 & 26
Venue:Ilsansuji, 2nd floor, 58 Gamjeoncheon-ro, Sasang-gu, Busan
In September 2026, 《Will You Be My Penpal?》 opens on the 2nd floor of Ilsansuji — the beginning of an exchange project between Joachim Blank's class at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) and the Department of Contemporary Art at Dong-A University. The artists' actual, in-person meeting is set for July next year. Before that, only the data of the works crosses over first. It is a preview exhibition in which data arrives ahead of everything else, crossing time and space. The title 《Will You Be My Penpal?》 is meant literally: a pen pal exchange.
What travels back and forth between the two distant places, Leipzig and Busan, is not text but a visual language carried by digital signals — different ways of approaching the medium.The participating HGB artists work with code, 3D scanning, AI-generated video, body data, and digital reconstruction. This data, arriving as files, commands, and renderings, only takes on material form once it is actually installed in the exhibition space in Busan. The five host artists from Dong-A University's Department of Contemporary Art respond instead with painting. The brushstrokes on canvas, the texture of paint, and their physical weight stand in sharp contrast to the immateriality of the transmitted data. Data that arrived from beyond the screen and canvases placed here in person meet on the 2nd floor of Ilsansuji. 《Will You Be My Penpal?》 is a place where data and materiality, the distant and the here, pass back and forth — and a letter that arrives first, before the real meeting next summer.
