Origami Hermit Crab: Order to Labyrinth: Jieun Cheon

Curated by Sooa Lim Feb 3-8, 2026 Closing reception Friday, Feb 6, 2026, 6PM-8PM ArtCake 2nd FL, studio 10 (214 40th St, Brooklyn, NY 11232)

Jieun Cheon’s solo exhibition, Origami Hermit Crab: Order to Labyrinth, is an immersive installation that invites visitors to move through an unfamiliar terrain where perception, scale, and orientation continually shift. As viewers navigate the space, they encounter a landscape that appears navigable yet resists clear direction, unfolding as a site of disorientation, pause, and imaginative projection.

In the exhibition, the artwork Origami Hermit Crab visualizes the myth of a giant hermit crab as a topography situated within the invisible realm between the world and individual perception, forming part of Cheon’s fictional universe, Uncanished Workld (uncanny world + unfinished work). The series reinterprets elements of the ancient Aspidochelone myth through their combination with fractal theory, expressing the complexity and sense of awe Cheon experienced while tracing the accumulated time and entangled traces encountered in historically, religiously, and culturally layered sites.

Drawing on fractal theory, which uncovers order within nature’s chaos, Cheon used the folded lines on repeatedly folded and unfolded paper as a structural framework. Architectural and natural elements from the places she visited were layered onto this framework, creating anti-fractal labyrinth patterns that appear to have an exit yet ultimately lead to disorientation. These patterns were transferred onto silk, symbolizing the shell of the giant hermit crab island, while the pen-drawn lines map the terrain of the fictional hermit crab island (The Anti-Fractal Map). Two rainbow quartz pieces at the center, the artworks titled Demagnified z-axis, represent the crab’s body and eyes, while simultaneously offering a unique visual perspective between the two dimensions of the world and individual perception.

As visitors navigate the intricate terrain of the installation, they explore the shifting boundaries between perception and imagination. Origami Hermit Crab: Order to Labyrinth offers an experiential environment in which an apparent order gradually unfolds into a labyrinthine condition, inviting visitors to move through the space and expand their own ways of seeing and sensing.

Artist Bio

Jieun Cheon
is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, sculpture, and installation. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (2025) and BFA and MFA degrees in Sculpture from Seoul National University. Her practice draws on reinterpreted religious, mythological, and scientific references to construct a fictional universe, Uncanished Workld, through which she develops spatial and visual systems across exhibitions, drawings, and sculptural environments.

Cheon has exhibited in the United States and internationally at venues including Asian Art Contemporary, Kunstraum LLC, NARS Foundation, A.I.R. Gallery, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Paris Koh Fine Arts, and On the Fringe Gallery. She has been an artist-in-residence at NARS International Artist Residency and Kunstraum, and will attend Vermont Studio Center in 2026 with a partial fellowship. Her work has been featured in Asian Art Contemporary, Asian American Art Review, Suboart Magazine, and Rexhibit.

Curator Bio

Sooa Lim is a curator and lead auction cataloguer whose work focuses on how artworks are selected and sequenced across the contexts of exhibitions and auctions. Through exhibition curating and auction catalogue development, she shapes visual structures through which artworks are publicly read. She studied History of Design and Curatorial Studies at Parsons School of Design, and her research engages Korean American art alongside mid-twentieth-century American design history and visual material culture. She is currently an AHL Foundation Research Fellow based in New York, in addition to her work in auctions.

Origami Hermit Crab: Order to Labyrinth

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