SPACE July 2026 (No. 704)
Lee Janghwan / Image courtesy of Lee Janghwan
Lee Janghwan (Principal, Urban Operations) has been selected as the Artistic Director of the Korean Pavilion for the 20th International Architecture Exhibition of the 2027 Venice Biennale. As an architect whose work traverses urbanism, culture, and architecture, Lee previously worked at OMA, where he contributed to projects across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, including the design of the Qatar National Library. Since then, he has co-led the research collective Mid-Size City Forum with Lee Sanghyun (Officer, Daegu Metropolitan City Urban Design Department), investigating transformations occurring beyond major metropolitan regions and exploring their future potential. In 2024 and 2025, the group published an eleven-part series entitled ‘The Possibilities Inherent in Extinction, Mid-Size City Forum’ in SPACE.
Lee’s exhibition, ‘Disappearing Cities, Accumulating Architecture (tentative name)’, examines the phenomenon of hyper-shrinkage in Korea within the broader global context of population decline and aging societies. The exhibition focuses on urban and architectural mutations observed in regional cities, including abandoned voids and the incremental addition of temporary materials and devices to aging houses. Rather than treating these conditions as regionally specific anomalies, the exhibition frames them as part of a trajectory that many places around the world may encounter in the near future. It also seeks to interpret such transformations not merely as symptoms of decline, but as adaptive responses that emerge through the acceptance of disappearance, exploring the spatial possibilities embedded within these evolving conditions.
The curatorial team will include Bae Yoonkyung (Professor, Dankook University), Lee Kyosuk (Associate Director, MVRDV), and Ko Jaehyub (Co-Principal, Mission Object) as Co-Curators. Under the theme ‘Do Architecture—For the Possibility of Coexistence Facing a Real Reality’, the 2027 International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, directed by Chinese architects Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, will be held from May 8 to Nov. 21, 2027.
