A Frame over the Atrium: Zach Lieberman and Art in Frame at The Hyundai Seoul

Seoul, Yeouido. Ride the escalators up through the atrium of the department store 더현대 서울 (The Hyundai Seoul) and a screen stretched long and horizontal comes into view through the leaves of the planting. Directly above the signage that reads "CULTURE HOUSE 1985," set into the topmost level of the atrium, an ultra-wide LED. Across it, grains of blue and red light bleed, spread outward like ripples, then trail into afterimages and vanish. At the edge of the picture, in a cursive script, the words "Art in Frame." The artist's name is set beside it in Hangul and in English — 재커리 리버만, Zach Lieberman.

On 2 July 2026, Lieberman posted the scene to his own X account: he was glad, he wrote, to have a work in the art frame series at Hyundai Seoul, with thanks to @seohyowork for the support. Three short videos capture light generated from code breathing slowly in the middle of an ordinary department-store atrium.

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Several lineages intersect behind this small post. The architectural lineage of Seoul's largest department store, which gave over half of its interior to landscape. The lineage of a department-store culture centre running since 1985. And the lineage of a circulating influence, in which practitioners of generative art invite one another across borders.

A Department Store That Gave Half of Itself to Landscape

더현대 서울 opened on 26 February 2021, in one corner of the Parc.1 mixed-use development in Yeouido. Its retail floor area of 89,100 square metres makes it the largest department store in Seoul. The design was a collaboration between RSHP (Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners), led by Richard Rogers, and the Korean practice SAMOO Architects & Engineers; the interior was the work of Burdifilek, of Toronto.

What characterises the building is a distribution of space that runs directly counter to the logic of sales floor area. Very nearly half of the interior is given over not to merchandise shelving but to indoor landscape. On the ground floor there is a Waterfall Garden twelve metres high. On the fifth, an indoor garden called Sounds Forest, planted with more than thirty trees, spreads out, and above it a void three storeys deep rises to a glass roof. For all that this is a department store, what sits at the centre of the building is not goods but light, greenery, and void.

This design decision — the decision not to sell — is what would later prepare a place for the screen. An atrium is a margin that architecture has deliberately left empty. At the top of that margin, directly above the culture centre's signage, an ultra-wide screen was set in place. Because the margin existed, a wall on which to hang a frame came into being.

The Picture Frame as a Format

"Art in Frame" appeared on this LED in December 2025. The inaugural artist was Seohyo (Seo Hyojung — 徐孝貞 / 서효정), a Seoul-based generative artist. Her own record on X reads "251201-260131 Art in Frame / The Hyundai": for roughly two months, from 1 December 2025 to 31 January 2026, the colourful ring-shaped forms that are her signature swam across this horizontal screen.

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The format of the series can be read off the title card that appears in Lieberman's video: a hand-drawn logo, the artist's name given in both Hangul and English, and an artist statement in Korean and English. For Lieberman's edition it reads as follows.

A media artist who translates light's reflections and afterimages into code, creating luminous scenes that flow like painting.

— Art in Frame タイトルカード(The Hyundai Seoul)source

"Luminous scenes that flow like painting." The statement corresponds precisely to the "Frame" of the series name. Not an advertising surface, not an information board: the screen is defined as a frame for hanging pictures in. This arrangement, in which the screen itself carries the artist's name and a description of the work, may fairly be called a transplant of the museum caption plate into the atrium of a department store.

Where the frame hangs is suggestive too. CULTURE HOUSE 1985, whose signage is mounted directly beneath the screen, is a culture centre on the sixth floor, and its name carries on the culture-centre business that Hyundai Department Store began with the opening of its Apgujeong flagship in 1985. Literally directly above a forty-year legacy of "the department store as the place where culture is taught" sits a screen bearing an artist's name.

The Return Flow of Influence

What makes this series interesting is the person on the inviting side. The @seohyowork to whom Lieberman offered thanks in his post is Seohyo herself, the inaugural artist.

Seohyo is an educator who teaches creative coding at SADI (the Samsung Art and Design Institute), and an artist who began a daily coding practice during the pandemic and moved in earnest into generative art. As the source of the idea for that daily practice, she has publicly named Zach Lieberman. Since 2016 Lieberman has kept up the daily code sketches he calls "daily sketches," opening the practice to practitioners across the world. He is a co-developer of openFrameworks, a co-founder of the School for Poetic Computation in New York (co-established in 2013), and, since 2019, head of the research group Future Sketches at the MIT Media Lab. EyeWriter, which makes drawing possible by gaze alone, is in the collection of MoMA and won a Golden Nica at Ars Electronica.

The two trajectories crossed in Tokyo, in February 2024. At Poems in Code — a collaborative programme between Civic Creative Base Tokyo (CCBT) and the Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions, held on the Center Square at Yebisu Garden Place — Seohyo co-directed the programme together with Takawo Shunsuke and exhibited her own work, Borrowed Landscapes. Among the twelve exhibiting artists is the name Zach Lieberman. On a screen in an urban plaza, the one who had been influenced and the one who had done the influencing shared the same surface.

Then, in July 2026, the positions reverse. The artist once inspired by Lieberman's daily practice has now moved to the side that welcomes him into a frame in a Seoul department store. Influence does not flow in one direction and end there; it circulates. Rather than the East Asian generative scene importing work from the Western "home ground," artists weave a screen through circuits of reciprocity among themselves — and this small reversal shows that the knot tying signage to art is made not by institutions but by relations between people.

Lieberman himself has been deepening his ties to the screens of East Asia. At M+ in Hong Kong he presented Atlas of Blobs in 2022, and in January 2026 he held a solo exhibition, "10 Lights," at the gallery clinic in Sangenjaya, Tokyo. The Seoul atrium lies on the same line, extended.

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Two Hyundais

One thing needs sorting out here. This is not the first time Lieberman and "Hyundai" have been connected. For Hyundai Artlab, the art platform of Hyundai Motor Group, he made Network, a work in which colour and energy travel between the nodes of a network diagram. But Hyundai Department Store, the party behind "Art in Frame," is a different company from Hyundai Motor. Hyundai Department Store Group is a retail conglomerate that separated from the Hyundai Group in 1999, and it differs in both capital and business from Hyundai Motor Group, which runs the Hyundai Commission with Tate Modern and the Hyundai Motorstudio.

Lieberman, in other words, has hung work on the screens of both "Hyundais": an online commission from a carmaker, and the physical atrium of a department store. That two corporate bodies bearing the same name arrived at the same artist by separate circuits is itself evidence that his coded inquiry into light is being sought, across corporate genres, as "a picture to hang on a screen."

Hyundai Department Store, for its part, is simultaneously pursuing a business that organises the screens inside its stores as advertising media. In November 2025 it unveiled a spherical LED three metres in diameter at 더현대 서울 and announced a retail media business that opens its in-store displays to outside advertisers as a platform. Within the same building, the screen is sold as an advertising slot and, at the same time, opened to artists as a frame. The old department-store problem of "reconciling commerce with culture," which this journal examined in The Suburban Screen: Half a Century of Tamagawa Takashimaya S·C, appears in Seoul as a double operation of the screen.

The Picture Frame and Tenkei

Look once more at the series name, "Art in Frame."

A department-store screen normally hides the fact that it is a frame. Advertising works to keep the edge of the picture out of mind, filling the whole field of view with the product. This series, by contrast, declares from its very name that the screen is a frame. A frame is a device of promise, indicating that what lies inside it is "a picture." Shoppers riding the escalator up are turned, by that declaration, into viewers for a few seconds.

This journal has called those few seconds a tenkei. Like the small boat or the human figure in an ink-wash landscape painting, it is the small presence that brings the whole landscape to life. The atrium of 더현대 서울 is an enormous margin produced by architecture surrendering half of itself to landscape, and the ultra-wide screen at its top functions as the single point that sets meaning into that margin. That Lieberman's work is "light that flows like painting" is no accident. A non-standard, extremely wide aspect ratio; legibility from a distance; a dwell time of a few seconds — generative art, which stretches and contracts parametrically, adapts most naturally to these conditions peculiar to signage. The shape of the frame comes first, and the picture answers to it.

And it bears emphasising once more that the programming of this frame rests, at least for the inaugural edition and this one, on relations between artists. It is not a department store placing an order with a global curatorial firm, nor an advertising agency filling a slot: a Seoul artist invites her own source of influence onto a Seoul screen. To the question of whose picture, out of all the world, to hang in this city's frame, the artists themselves hold the answer.

Outlook

Seoul already has a case known worldwide for the sheer intensity of its screen imagery. WAVE at COEX K-POP Square shut an enormous wave inside a curved surface and marked a high point of urban-screen spectacle. "Art in Frame" sits at the opposite pole. Not spectacle, but a picture hung quietly in the margin of an atrium. Those who pass by pass by; only those who look up attend the few seconds of the exhibition.

The atrium of a department store is a more private place than an urban plaza and a more public one than a museum. Forty years on from the culture centre of 1985, the present tense of the experience Hyundai Department Store has cultivated — "encountering culture at the department store" — is alight, as a picture of light generated from code, directly above the culture centre's signage. Whose picture will hang next in the Seoul frame? This journal intends to keep watching this small series from a fixed point.

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Sources

1. fig.001Zach Lieberman — X (installation report, 2 July 2026)(2026-07-02)
2. fig.002Seohyo — X (record of the inaugural Art in Frame edition, run 251201-260131)(2025-12-09)
3. fig.003Zach Lieberman: Making something everyday — Unit London (YouTube)
4. fig.004clinic — Zach Lieberman "10 Lights" (Instagram)
5. [5]SAMOO — The Hyundai Seoul (design overview and opening)
6. [6]The Plan Award 2022 — The Hyundai Seoul (Burdifilek)
7. [7]Frame — The Hyundai Seoul
8. [8]Hyundai Department Store — CULTURE HOUSE 1985 (official)
9. [9]MIT News — Zach Lieberman joins the MIT Media Lab(2019-11-25)
10. [10]Hyundai Artlab — Between Text and Image: Q&A with Zach Lieberman
11. [11]Unit London — Dr Zsofi Valyi-Nagy on Circles, Blobs, Ripples by Zachary Lieberman(2024-02-06)
12. [12]Tokyo Art Beat — Zach Lieberman "10 Lights" (clinic, Tokyo)
13. [13]CCBT — Poems in Code: Generative Art Today (in collaboration with the Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions, 2024)
14. [14]Le Random — Seohyo (artist profile)
15. [15]Maeil Business Newspaper (매일경제) — Hyundai Department Store’s retail media network business (spherical LED unveiled)(2025-11-11)

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Hyundai Department Store (The Hyundai Seoul)

LOCATION

Seoul

MODEL

Operator commission — The department store programs the ultra-wide atrium LED as a picture frame, one artist at a time; Seohyo, the inaugural artist, is credited as supporting the Zach Lieberman edition

CADENCE

Artist-by-artist rotations; the inaugural Seohyo edition ran about two months (Dec 1, 2025 – Jan 31, 2026)

SPEC

An ultra-wide LED at the top of the atrium, directly above the CULTURE HOUSE 1985 signage on the sixth floor

SINCE

2025-12

STATUS

Active

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