In June, the month when the energy of spring gives way to the rising summer winds, the Seoul Botanic Park is hosting the special exhibition Adoring Harmony: Interwoven Reflection. Over the course of a year, from June 23, 2026, to May 16, 2027, a selection of new artworks will accompany the park’s flora and their changing seasons. Adoring Harmony, featuring works by artists Goo Gijeong, Um A Long, Lee Jiyen, and Chang Hanna, aspires to continue the thematic flow from the past two special exhibitions: Rhythm: Being Two in Nature in 2024, which explored respect and harmony with non-human beings, and Our Nature, Planetary Coexistence in 2025, which emphasized the sensation of proactive, mutual coexistence.

Adoring Harmony, the 2026 special exhibition, imagines the Symbiocene, the era believed to exist beyond the Anthropocene — a period marked by humanity’s destruction of the Earth — and in which humans and nature coexist in harmony. Specifically, this imagination began with questions arising from the exhibition’s title: “What is adoring harmony?” and “What are the things we need to achieve adoring harmony?” Prompted by these questions, this exhibition recalls the “Indra’s Net,” a concept in the Avatamsaka Sutra, an imaginary net in which round mirror beads are suspended at each knot, so that any single bead reflects the image of every other bead in the net.

In this exhibition, we hope to transcend the boundary between human and non-human beings and highlight how everything in the world is interconnected like a spiderweb, incessantly reflecting and influencing one another. We encourage you to step outside anthropocentric thought, adopt a posthumanist perspective, and thereby view all beings — humans included — as relational beings interconnected with a whole. Additionally, this four-section exhibition traces the relationships among interconnected beings and proposes new perspectives and attitudes necessary for us to attain “adoring harmony.”

This exhibition, connecting four different spaces —Conservatory, Display Gardens, Botanic Center Project Hall2, and Magok Cultural Hall — begins with “Section 1. Listening Closely: Light and Sound” in Project Hall2, showcasing Lee Jiyen’s sculptural installation, Stain-Rainbow Forest7. The exhibition continues to “Section 2. Crisscrossing Dialogues” in Display Gardens, presenting Um A Long’s works, Interconnected Flow and Move and Move. The next section, “Section 3. Scenes of Attunement,” takes place in the Conservatory, featuring Chang Hanna’s works, New Rock Inukshuk, Which One Is the New Rock?, and Which One Is the Natural Rock? Lastly, “Section 4. Through a Lingering Gaze” in Magok Cultural Hall unfurls Goo Gijeong’s immersive installation piece, Every Organism Subtly Moves with Its Own Independent Rhythm.

Through the works presented by the four participating artists, Adoring Harmony explores how all beings in the universe — whether natural, human, or technology-born — are situated in a mutually mirroring relationship that constantly reflects one another. Recognizing this cosmic interconnectedness can be the starting point for us to achieve “adoring harmony” with every other being. Permeating the Seoul Botanic Park, Adoring Harmony eagerly awaits to commune with visitors, hoping to share the sensation that all beings are intricately linked together like a tight-knit web. Finally, we hope this exhibition provides time to collectively imagine the possibility of a sustainable connectedness that reflects one another through a warm gaze.