Between Borrowed Landscapes and TENKEI: Seo Hyojung and the Aesthetics of East Asian Signage

Leave Ebisu Station through the east exit, cross the Yebisu Skywalk — the long covered moving-walkway that ferries commuters out of the JR concourse and toward the office-and-retail complex south of the tracks — and step into the open volume of Yebisu Garden Place Center Square. A vertical screen, roughly four metres tall, stands at the head of the plaza. In February 2024, the surface of that screen was running Borrowed Landscapes, a generative series by a Seoul-based artist. The artist's name is Seo Hyojung. She was also one of the two co-program directors of the exhibition, and one of twelve international artists whose work was shown on the square during those weeks.

The programme — Poems in Code: Generative Art Today and Programming-Generated Moving Image — was produced by CCBT (Civic Creative Base Tokyo, a public commissioning body operated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum) and presented as a satellite event of the 16th Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions, themed 30 Ways to Go to the Moon. The festival is the long-running annual showcase of moving-image art organised by the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum since 2009. Poems in Code ran from February 2 through 18, 2024. Center Square is a free public plaza, accessible every day from 10:00 to 20:00 to anyone who happens to walk through it.

That an artist from Seoul stood on a public screen in Tokyo and ran a work titled Borrowed Landscapes — this fact alone carries the argument of the essay. If shakkei (借景, "borrowed landscape") is the relation by which what lies outside a frame is drawn into the frame, then tenkei (点景, "a small point that animates the scene") is its mirror: the relation by which a point placed within a frame brings the surrounding emptiness to life. The two are not opposites. They are the obverse and reverse of the same figure-ground relation. When Seo's work moved across the Ebisu screen, two East Asian spatial concepts came to overlap on a single surface, on a single plaza. This essay traces that overlap across three particular streetscapes: Gwanghwamun in Seoul, Center Square in Tokyo, and the courtyard of Prague Castle.

Shakkei as a Frame

Borrowed Landscapes is a series produced between 2020 and 2024 — the core of the generative work that Seo has built up since the pandemic from a discipline of daily coding. The title is a direct calque of shakkei, the East Asian garden technique by which a designer pulls distant elements — a mountain on the horizon, a bamboo grove beyond the boundary wall — into the visual composition of the garden itself. In classical practice the operation is carried out by the angles of openings, the positioning of plantings, the height of fences. Seo has displaced the operation into an algorithm. What lies outside the screen, what the panel can never literally show, is folded back into the panel as a generated landscape.

The implementation is patient, almost monastic. Within the series sit sub-titles such as Beneath the Waves, Echoing Edges, Harmonic Oscillations, Joyous Swirls, Layered Lattices, Pulsating Patterns. Each carries a repetitive structure close to a natural phenomenon or to woven cloth; visually, the works hold the quietness of an ink-wash mountain-and-water painting. In a signage ecology where advertising spots are typically cut at the second, Borrowed Landscapes moves slowly enough that time appears to dilate inside a single frame.

In an interview published on Medium, Seo positions the computer not as a tool but as a perceptual organ.

I see media technology as a sixth sense that goes beyond the five senses.

— ARTSCLOUD — Interview with Seo, Hyo-Jungsource

The reading that follows naturally: the generative algorithm functions as a device that carries "the reality beyond the frame" — the part of the world the senses cannot fully grasp — into the frame. The role once played by the verandah post that cropped the distant mountain, in the classical shakkei tradition, is now played, line by line, by the code.

Tenkei as the Reverse Side

If shakkei pulls what is outside the frame inward, tenkei runs the other direction. The small human figure, the small boat, brushed into the corner of a vast East Asian landscape painting is not the subject of the picture. It is placed there so that the surrounding emptiness — the mountains, the water, the sky — can become readable as scenery. One small point is what allows the rest to register as composed space. In the language of figure and ground: the figure produces the ground. This is the structure of tenkei.

The four-metre screen standing in Center Square was itself one such point. On either side of it stretched office façades, sky, planting; the vertical panel stood in the middle of that volume as a single mark. Our earlier essay in this issue, on the suburban screen at Tamagawa Takashimaya, argued that a screen placed in the street begins to function as an apparatus that animates its surroundings — that throws the architecture, the sky, and the passers-by into legible relation. The Ebisu screen did that work as well. The panel was a tenkei in the plaza; the Borrowed Landscapes running on its surface was a shakkei within the panel. These two East Asian concepts did not coincide on the square by accident. They were paired by the very condition of a screen standing in public space.

Neither Seo, nor the editorial team behind Poems in Code, has stated this overlap explicitly. Co-program director Takawo Shunsuke and Seo do not, in any public statement we have located, directly invoke the Japanese or Korean traditions of shakkei and tenkei. The reading is offered here as TENKEI's own. The argument is that shakkei and tenkei are not opposing concepts but a single relation seen from two sides — and that the moment a screen is placed in a street, the relation completes itself, whether the operator names it or not.

Gwanghwamun, Incheon, and the Eurasian Distribution Network

Ebisu is not the only public screen on which Seo's work appears. Three independent artist profiles — Le Random, Pocko, and Artpoint — list, in almost identical order, the following venues: the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History on Gwanghwamun Square, Seoul; Incheon International Airport; Kerry Center in Hangzhou; Ten Square in Singapore; Hoog Catharijne in Utrecht; and Yebisu Garden Place. The exact dates of each placement, the duration of each run, and the operating party at each venue are not consistently verifiable from a single primary source, so what is asserted here is only the fact that the same itinerary appears, repeatedly, across multiple artist profiles.

Even so, the geography it sketches is forceful. Gwanghwamun is the central axis of modern Seoul — the boulevard that runs from the restored Gyeongbokgung palace gate south to City Hall, lined with the institutional fabric of the Korean state. The National Museum of Korean Contemporary History stands on that axis. To run a generative work on its façade LED is, in Tokyo terms, comparable to a permanent installation on a national institution at Ueno or facing the Imperial Palace. The media walls of Incheon International Airport function as one of the first visual surfaces an international traveler encounters on arrival in Korea — a deliberately curated layer of the country's outward-facing image. Kerry Center Hangzhou, Ten Square Singapore, Hoog Catharijne Utrecht: with these, the commercial LED network stretches from the eastern edge of Eurasia to its western edge.

A single artist's generative output is blinking, distributed, across this network. For the kind of distributed-distribution model TENKEI tracks — curated content moving across multiple sites in parallel — this is a precedent worth noting. The hardware belongs to different operators, the scheduling lies with different teams, yet the work that appears on the surface bears the same artist's name. The configuration is a sketch, already realised in fact, of the upstream-database → curation-label → multi-site signage flow that this journal has begun to map.

Educator and Artist

Seo's trajectory is unusual for the field. Born in Seoul in 1972, she studied chemistry at Seoul Women's University, then completed Communication Design at SADI (Samsung Art and Design Institute, an industry-affiliated design school established in Seoul in the mid-1990s) and an MFA in Digital Media Design at IDAS (Hongik University's International Design school for advanced studies). Since 2001 her primary occupation has been Associate Professor at SADI; she has also taught in the graduate programmes at Hanyang and Dongguk. The educator's career, by 2026, is past the twenty-year mark.

Her decisive turn toward generative art is more recent. She names Zach Lieberman, the New York-based educator and creative-coding artist, as a direct influence, and dates her own pivot to the period after the pandemic, when she committed to a daily coding practice. More than twenty years as an educator; barely five as a generative artist — the time differential gives her output an unusual composure. Like most artists working at this scale in signage, she has accepted commercial commissions (Nike, SHISEIDO, Peugeot, Shu Uemura, Guerlain), but the centre of gravity remains the classroom and the studio. The daily coding ritual is the way someone who teaches keeps her own hands moving.

That dual axis — educator and artist — connects directly to the structural argument TENKEI is continuing to develop around East Asian signage thought. Read against Raven Kwok, the Shanghai-based artist whose work this journal is also tracking, Seo forms a productive contrast on every axis: position relative to teaching, distance from state infrastructure, mode of public presence on social platforms. Three corners — mainland China, Korea, and Japan — are each producing a distinct ecology where signage and generative practice meet. Mapping that triangle through artist-level essays is the work this journal is beginning to undertake. Seo is the first vertex.

Coded Tapestry, and the Geography of East Asia

In October 2024, Seo flew to Prague. At the Signal Festival — the annual outdoor light festival that has run through central Prague each autumn since 2013, generally counted as the largest of its kind in Central Europe — the western façade of the Prague Castle Riding School (Jízdárna Pražského hradu, the former royal stable hall on the castle grounds) carried Coded Tapestry: Prague, the local edition of her ongoing series. Coded Tapestry takes the form of city-specific versions: the procedure of translating each city's textile traditions, geometries, and natural motifs into code is itself the work.

The localisable generative work is one of the more interesting forms to emerge from the past few years of festival circuits — extending an approach Seo developed at Demo Festival (a network originating in Utrecht and broadcasting simultaneously to outdoor screens in cities worldwide) and D:Art Festival (London-based). The work is regenerated to fit each new city's context, while the screen — as a shared format — moves across territories. The distribution model this journal is gradually outlining resonates with exactly this form of practice. Rewriting one line of code can carry one city's textile culture onto a screen in another. The artist becomes the designer of that rewriting.

This essay is the first artist-level piece in TENKEI. Read alongside the forthcoming Raven Kwok feature this journal is tracking, it completes the first pair of "East-Asian-born international signage artists" we are following. Raven Kwok in mainland China, Seo Hyojung in Korea: two artists who anchor the vertical axis of the geography of East Asian signage thought we will continue to extend in subsequent essays. The first two points are placed.

Return to the four-metre screen in Ebisu. Seo Hyojung's borrowed landscapes ran inside its frame; the frame itself stood as a tenkei in the plaza. For sixteen days in February 2024, shakkei and tenkei shared a single surface. Each time a screen is placed in a street, these two East Asian relations re-coincide, often without the audience noticing. This essay is a first attempt to set the coordinates of that coincidence — across Seoul, Tokyo, and Prague.

Sources

1. fig.001MoltenArt / Dorothy Di Stefano,Generative artist, Hyojung Seo — MoltenArt (YouTube)
2. fig.001CCBT / Tokyo Metropolitan Government,Poems in Code — Civic Creative Base Tokyo (CCBT)(2024-02)
3. fig.002MoltenArt / Dorothy Di Stefano,Generative art — Artist Seohyo (Tokyo Midtown) — MoltenArt (YouTube)
4. fig.002Le Random,Seohyo — Artist Profile, Le Random
5. fig.003Signal Festival,SIGNAL FESTIVAL 2024 | AFTERMOVIE (YouTube)(2024-10)
6. fig.003Signal Production s.r.o.,Seohyo (KOR) — Signal Festival Prague 2024(2024-10)
7. [7]Tokyo Art Beat,Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions 2024 — 30 Ways to Go to the Moon
8. [8]Seo Hyojung,About Hyojung SEO — seo.hyo
9. [9]ARTSCLOUD,Interview with Seo, Hyo-Jung
10. [10]Seo Hyojung,seohyo — Instagram
11. [11]Pocko,Seo Hyojung — Pocko