'LEX TALIONIS' (English)

PS CENTER / COSO

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February 2026

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Lex Talionis. Originating from the Code of Hammurabi in 18th-century BCE Babylonia, this "law of retaliation" establishes the principle of exact and proportional retribution. The chilling maxim, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," was not merely a record of visceral vengeance; rather, it functioned as a mechanism of restraint—a legal apparatus designed to prevent excessive retaliation by mandating a strict equivalence. It was humanity’s harrowing yet elegant pact toward an equilibrium rooted in accountability. While modern jurisprudence has transitioned this into the "principle of proportionality" in sentencing, the relationship between humanity and the environment remains governed by the primitive logic of Lex Talionis. Our cities—the sprawling concrete jungles in which we reside—reiterate this ancient principle through a sophisticated modern lens. As we engineer and erect the city, the city, in turn, circumscribes and polices our lives. When we deplete the environment by constructing urban spaces in anti-naturalistic modes, the city retaliates, returning that consumption to us as alienation and toxicity. The exhibition «Lex Talionis» traces this inexorable, equivalent trajectory of action and reaction between the urban fabric and the human subject.

While the post-Enlightenment city is perceived as a calculated construct predicated on cartographic precision, its reality is that of a "vaguely open site" (espace ouvert)—continually deconstructed and reconstituted through the erratic rhythms of its inhabitants and their serendipitous encounters. The city is less a fossilized architectural form than a dynamic spatiality where emotion, memory, and occasional resistance coalesce in a state of flux. While standardized grid structures and seamless surfaces render the city orderly and efficient, they simultaneously overwhelm and anesthetize human sensory perception. Yet, the narratives woven into the interstices of this rigid order—born from the minutiae of individual lives—fracture the city’s hardened shell. Through these fissures, the city finally transcends its artifice to become a "nature" that cradles our existence. This profound disjunction between the engineered physical environment and the lived experience of its denizens serves as the vital kinetic energy that allows the urban ecosystem to breathe.

Wooyoung Kim captures the strata of time where human traces linger within the city’s steadfast order. In his photography, urban walls and apertures transcend cold architectural boundaries to become registers of a narrative forged by the interplay of light and shadow. His work, rendered through a refined gaze, demonstrates how the inherent materiality of the city is sublimated into an abstract aesthetic when confronted by the human eye. These are not static landscapes; they manifest as monumental mirrors reflecting the gravitas of life endured within the city’s "open sites."

Conversely, Sijae Jang summons the skeletal essence of the city—steel and metal—into the gallery space to expose the artificial and imposing reality of urban structures. His monumental installations provide a three-dimensional formalization of how systems regulate and sever human connection, and conversely, how individuals find ways to solidarize and recover within these power structures. By obstructing and exerting pressure on the viewer’s movement, his constructs awaken a visceral tension with the urban organism, forcing us to confront the material consequences of the act of "building."

This chain of oppositional action and reaction expands into ecological circulation in the work of WKND Lab. They transmute urban detritus and organic waste into novel materials, shifting the lexicon of the city from one of depletion and decay to one of regeneration. For the city to function as a sustainable organism, the relationship between human intervention, nature, and objects must be fundamentally redefined. By returning urban byproducts to the realm of everyday objects, WKND Lab proposes a physical and ethical point of equilibrium between the act of "building" and the praxis of "dwelling."

«Lex Talionis» invites a profound contemplation of our complex relationship with the city, traversing the boundaries of order and rupture, and the circulation of matter. The city is never a static terminus. As revealed through the intersecting gazes of these three artists, it is an unfinished, open site birthed from the perpetual collision of transgression and acceptance. Through this exhibition, we invite the viewer to encounter the solemn principle of reciprocity: that in the very act of building the city, the city is also building us.

Wooyoung Kim

Photographer Wooyoung Kim goes beyond mere documentation to meticulously reconstruct urban landscapes as finely calculated ‘mise-en-scènes.’ Within his lens, the seemingly chaotic facets of the city are transmuted into a refined aesthetic order through perfected symmetries and subtle variations of light. This approach compels the viewer to witness the sublimation of everyday fragments into enduring aesthetics, capturing the paradoxical permanence within the ephemeral urban fabric.

Sijae Jang

Installation artist Sijae Jang visualizes the primordial forces of the city through raw materials and structures sourced directly from industrial sites. His work makes palpable the pressure that physical construction exerts upon actual life, and the subsequent resistance it provokes. This practice is both an attempt to reclaim rigid urban spaces as pliable sites touched by human breath and a dramatic narrative of structural healing.

WKND Lab

Design studio WKND Lab (Harin Lee, Eunji Jun) focuses on the marginalized byproducts generated during the city’s metabolic processes. They transmute discarded organic waste into sustainable biomaterials, thereby expanding the act of ‘dwelling’ into an ethic of ecological responsibility. By sensory demonstrating how our actions upon the environment inevitably return to us in material form, they present a profound aesthetic of circulation and renewal.