산을 넘은 자들 / Those Who Crossed the Mountain / Más allá de la montaña

This body of work belongs to the irony of fantasy: that territory where what appears imagined turns out to be the most truthful. Shambhala is the name traditions have given to such a place, a secluded community governed by other temporalities, accessible only through sensory immersion, where the human can be thought of as unfinished, porous, in constant negotiation with other forms of life, memory, and myth. Like mycelium connecting beneath the ground before anything has a name, this exhibition presents itself as a living and shared territory where the feminine emerges a

a principle, where community replaces individuality, and where the viewer’s experience is constructed through immersion. It is a gravitational leap into the mystery of a world that seems to exist in a parallel dimension.

Miju Lee (South Korea, 1982) creates an entire cosmology of the threshold, where the Migoi exist as hybrid bodies suspended between ancestral memory and transformation: figures that have lost recognizable features and therefore place us in that uneasy boundary of “neither human nor non-human.” In Tibetan tradition, the Kang Admi, the snow man, already contains a paradox: he is human, yet of a prior, undomesticated order, inhabiting the margins of the known.

Miju Lee reverses this logic. If myth has always positioned the Yeti as a fleeting apparition in our world, her universe places the viewer in the role of the intruder.

There are those who slowly create fleeting apparitions, who do not invent but remember: roots, foliage, astral rays… threads of death, threads of life, threads of time. In that shared movement, in the exact moment when we stop observing, magic reaches us. And it is precisely in that nameless, senseless place where the viewer can reconnect with something they recognize without knowing exactly what it is.

The installation is the work itself: a living, orchestrated world, a choreography of shy beings and presences- a visible utopia accessible only through immersion. Miju Lee designs the entire space, distances, sightlines, lighting, circulation, so that those who enter can inhabit this universe. Objects that once existed only in her mind- fungi, stones, plants, fruits- materialize as sculptures, gaining volume and their own rhythm, as if the image had decided to cross its own frame. This is what the artist calls reclaiming the power of unnecessary imagination: that which does not resolve or explain but simply allows everything to move toward unexpected directions.

Within Shinto cosmology, there is a tradition that situates the sacred within nature itself: in rivers, trees, mountains, and roots. These same elements populate this universe, forming a community of beings that do not belong to the everyday world yet are not entirely separate from it. In this intersection may lie the oldest function of art: to remind us who we are when we stop acting as we are supposed to.

Through a multidisciplinary dynamic between painting and sculpture, Miju Lee constructs a microcosm where dream and reality coexist without contradiction: women possess magical abilities, live in rhythm with nature, and mythological characters come to life under the same logic. The feminine germinates, life, regeneration, the same threshold that fungi understand better than anyone, and which Miju Lee transforms into image, body, and inhabitable space.

Like Miyazaki’s Forest Spirit, which exists fully only in the instant of its transformation, the yetis and the feminine inhabit that place where “the human has not yet finished becoming something else.” Those Who Crossed the Mountain, 산을 넘은 자들 is a territory to be crossed. Perhaps this is why wisdom also comes from what we cannot name, because to name is to fix, and this world exists only in movement, in transition, in the precise moment when we stop observing and begin to belong.

Miju Lee secretly connects other worlds with our own. The viewer who enters Those Who Crossed the Mountain does not yet know it, but has already crossed.

Victoria Rivers

Curator and writer