No More Play originally refers to an early 1930s work by the Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti. In his early practice, Giacometti often explored themes of games and play, and No More Play features small movable game pieces. Borrowing its title from this work, No More Play was the final event in a program initiated while renovating Shower—a former photo studio whose six surfaces were covered in airbrushed clouds—into an exhibition space in spring 2023. On some days, the carpenters lingered after work, inviting friends over for food and drinks. Later, in July 2024, we asked our friend, the artist Simon Shim Sutcliffe, who was visiting Seoul briefly, to make a structure one could play with using materials discarded from the previous exhibition. He made a model of a bridge. The process was opened to the public on several occasions, and just before the artist left Korea, we held a party, using the bridge he made as a bar table. This edition is organized more like a group exhibition. We have been meeting regularly with the artists since the beginning of the year. While the preparation has moved more quickly than a typical exhibition, the process has also assumed a slower rhythm and a certain trust: each time we arrive at Shower—sometimes together, sometimes out of sync—we can only gauge the progress of the works through the traces of making the artists have left behind.

Dahwan, with his close colleague Mary, is producing a replica of the original sculpture. This exhibition was his first introduction to the original work. Although he has never seen the sculpture in person, he spoke of feeling an overwhelming attraction to it and of wanting to approach it precisely because of his unfamiliarity with the work. He thus chose to attempt a faithful replica, embracing in advance the failure that was bound to come. For this exhibition, he has also chosen to present the work on a pedestal made from a well-used suitcase. He spoke of recently moving repeatedly between home, studio, a new residency, and Shower, taking a certain pride in the suitcase’s many uses. He told us that he currently owns between twenty and thirty suitcases.

About three years ago, in a solo exhibition at Windmill and Shower, Yonsok reconfigured the stage structure of a traditional theater using long-cut acrylic mirror panels. After the exhibition ended, the panels were stored in his studio. Earlier this year, they returned to Shower, marking the beginning of his preparations for this exhibition. Yonsok arranged the panels on the floor with their backs—marked by scratches and stains—facing upward. The fact that this space is larger and less controlled than his studio also seems to have shaped the work. On a night when the artists gathered at Shower to talk, Yonsok spoke about the backs of paintings and the surrounding elements that frame them, reflecting on the physical weight and slow temporality involved in the conservation processes of monumental paintings in museum-scale institutions.

For a few days in January, Leesop visited Shower and occupied a corner of the space to test work for his exhibitions taking place in January and March. Like Yonsok, Leesop works with us. Although this was his first time using Shower in this way, it felt like something that might happen again—and something to be welcomed. We spoke about the materials Leesop frequently uses and suggested that it might be interesting to see what would happen if he took some distance from them for this exhibition. Leesop readily accepted this. We remember him arriving with only a minimal set of materials and tools from his studio. One night, when all four artists were present at Shower, he asked the other three to set limitations or rules for his production process for the exhibition.

While in the final stages of preparing her January exhibition, Hyein asked Shampoo to fabricate several pedestals. These were made on site, and during those days Hyein and the friends assisting her naturally continued other work here as well. The work with the pedestal uses a coded motor to intermittently blow air inside a vitrine, scattering paper confetti like a snowball. The piece holds the viewer in place until the motor activates and the “snow” begins to fall. Returning to Shower while her January exhibition was still on view and beginning a new production there informed her approach to this exhibition. She revisited materials left behind at Shower, including those she had not used or had used incorrectly. The work presented in this exhibition reflects her thinking on reassigning functions to materials, or retaining their original functions while shifting form.