Most immersive art you can currently buy a ticket to is a screen problem: how many projectors, how bright, how seamless the edge blend. A.A. Murakami have spent a decade making the opposite argument — that the most affecting immersive material is the one that dissipates while you look at it.
Their exhibition “New Nature” opened September 1, 2026 at Paradise City Art Gallery in Incheon, near Seoul, and runs through February 10, 2027. It is the duo’s first solo exhibition in South Korea.
Ephemeral Tech
A.A. Murakami is Azusa Murakami, born in Japan, and Alexander Groves, born in the UK. They met at the Royal College of Art and have worked together since, under the studio name Studio Swine for much of that time and increasingly under their own.
The term they use for the practice is “Ephemeral Tech”: advanced engineering aimed at substances whose form is unfixed and which disappear on their own schedule. Soap bubbles. Mist. Smoke rings. The technical work is real — bubble machines that produce a specific membrane thickness on a specific interval, mist systems tuned to hang rather than fall — but it is all in service of something that is gone in seconds.
This is a materially different proposition from a projection-mapped room. A projection is a picture of something. A mist-filled chamber is a thing you are inside of, and the reason it works on people has nothing to do with resolution.
The exhibition’s theme
The curatorial framing for “New Nature” is “Nature after Nature” — works that stage nature’s genesis, transformation, and disappearance through technological means, rather than depicting nature or simulating it.
The show gathers:
- New Spring — the duo’s best-known piece, a tree-like structure that releases mist-filled bubbles which burst on contact with skin, releasing scent. It has shown in Milan, London, and Tokyo; this is its Korean debut.
- Beyond the Horizon — a work in the same family of dissolving-material installation.
- Mud Painting: A Thousand Layers of Camouflage — a world premiere, unveiled here for the first time anywhere.
That last one is the reason to pay attention. A world premiere at a commercial gallery show in Incheon is an unusual placement for a studio with A.A. Murakami’s exhibition history, and the title suggests a departure from the vaporous work into something with sedimentary weight.
The venue, and why it matters
Paradise City is a resort complex near Incheon International Airport that has been running a serious annual art program: Banksy and Keith Haring in 2023, Josh Sperling in 2024, Joel Mesler in 2025, and now A.A. Murakami. Naming a technology-driven installation practice as the fourth entry in that sequence is a statement about where the duo now sit — not in a media-art ghetto, but in the same rotation as blue-chip painting.
It also means the show is free of the thing that usually constrains this work: a media-art festival’s two-week run. Five months is long enough that the piece can be visited more than once, which for work that changes minute to minute is not a trivial difference.
Related Reading
- Paradise City opens A.A. Murakami’s first solo exhibition in Korea, ‘New Nature’ — Sports Khan
- Paradise City Hosts A.A. Murakami’s ‘New Nature’ Exhibition — Seoul Economic Daily
- A.A.Murakami on Existence as Medium — Le Random
- Artists A.A.Murakami Turn Engineering Into Fleeting Moments Of Beauty — Forbes
- A.A.Murakami — studio site