Opening: Friday, April 04, 7 pm

From 1910 to 1945—until the ally of Nazi Germany, the Japanese Empire surrendered—Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. During this time, Koreans were not allowed to work as architects. Therefore, the Seoul railway station, completed in 1925, was designed by a Japanese professor at Tokyo Imperial University, Tsukamoto Yasushi.

The neo-Palladian style—or “European-style exotic”, as it says on the website of the Culture Station Seoul 284, which has been using the building for exhibitions, performances and workshops since 2011—transports visitors, associatively, to Venice. Or to Lucerne, where an astonishingly similar railway station stood from 1896–1971. The Lucerne station was built by Hans Wilhelm Auer, a Swiss-Austrian architect, student of Theophil Hansen, and construction manager of several buildings, designed by the latter, on Vienna’s Ringstrasse. 

Hannahlisa Kunyik uses this site filled with dense historical and cultural references during her artist residency in Seoul in 2024, as one location of her ongoing series “Self-portrait at…” . The first edition of the series was created at Belvedere 21 in 2023 for the group exhibition “About the New. Viennese Scenes and Beyond” and is now being continued by Kunyik at various venues of artistic institutions. In addition to the specific architecture of the respective scenery, production conditions are also incorporated into the imagery. She wears clothes by local designers—here a coat by Assembled Half (Sojin Park).

To realize the series, Hannahlisa Kunyik collaborated with the photographer Carolina Frank, with whom she shares a long-standing debate on the relationship between performance and photography.

Vienna based artist Hannahlisa Kunyik explores social relations through the body, place/space and image. She works cross-media, site- and context-specific.
Her solo exhibitions include Self Portrait at Culture Station Seoul 284, hoast (2025), Not Yet Titled [Self Portrait in Front of Scene] at Foto Wien (2023), NO RISK NO PAIN – NO LIFE NO GRIEF – NO JOY NO JOY – NO JOY NO JOY at Fox Wien (2022), Dance While You Can at Stiege 13 (2022), and Paukhofstraße at MUSA Vienna Museum (2021). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions such as Sold! at Vienna Museum (2024), Passages, DMZ Paju/Seoul (2024) and About the New. Viennese Scenes and Beyond at Belvedere 21 (2023). Kunyik’s work is represented in the collections of Vienna Museum, in the State Collection of Lower Austria, and various private collections. She has received several grants including the Ö1 Talentestipendium (2014), the Art Start Scholarship of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2018), the Austrian Start Scholarship (2019), Residencies of the Austrian Ministry of Culture in Shanghai (1016) and Seoul (2024). 2025 she received the Austrian State Scholarship.

Image: Hannahlisa Kunyik 2024: Self Portrait at Culture Station Seoul 284. Credits: Carolina Frank

Supported by the Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport and by the Lower Austria Art Fund Kulturland_NOE