Installation view of Elmgreen & Dragset's "Shadow House" (2024) at the duo's exhibition, titled "Spaces," at the Amorepacific Museum of Art in central Seoul / Courtesy of the artists and Amorepacific Museum of Art

At the entrance of a sleek, glass-and-concrete home hangs a mirror with a curious message scrawled across its surface: “See you never!” Beneath it, a once-vibrant bouquet of roses lies wilted, as though forgotten in haste.

Who left these cryptic words, and who were they meant for? The house feels abandoned, yet the story it hides is only beginning to unravel.

As visitors step inside the seemingly deserted residence, they find themselves in the role of voyeuristic intruders, playing amateur detectives to piece together the lives of the absent occupants.

Clues are scattered in every corner of the 140-square-meter house — a study cluttered with architectural sketches and models, a child's bedroom drained of color and joy, a family portrait of a woman and a boy, and finally, the boy himself, left all alone, gazing vacantly out the living room window.

As visitors step inside the seemingly deserted residence of "Shadow House," they find themselves in the role of voyeuristic intruders, playing amateur detectives to piece together the lives of the absent occupants through hidden clues. Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

The eerily lifelike mannequin and custom-made furnishings, which serve as the backdrop to this unsettling narrative, are enough to make visitors forget that they're actually standing inside a museum in Seoul.

And that's precisely the intention of artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. Since 1995, the Scandinavian duo has played around with institutional art spaces, transforming them into uncanny replicas of everyday settings — a 1980s subway station frozen in time, an abandoned airport, a prison cell, the private home of a collector found drowned in his own swimming pool and even a Prada boutique slowly deteriorating in the middle of the Texas desert (“Prada Marfa”).

“Shadow House” is the latest immersive installation brought to life by Elmgreen & Dragset for their exhibition, “Spaces,” at the Amorepacific Museum of Art.

“It's almost like a horror movie setup,” Elmgreen said of the deserted family home, noting that the Oscar-winning film “Parasite” was one of the subtle inspirations for the piece. “[In the movie,] a house was the element that triggered the whole narrative, that triggered the whole story.”

Elmgreen & Dragset's "The Amorepacific Pool" (2024) / Courtesy of the artists and Amorepacific Museum of Art

Installation view of Elmgreen & Dragset's exhibition, "Spaces," at the Amorepacific Museum of Art / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

In what marks their largest exhibition in Asia to date, the two creatives have fashioned four other equally discomforting environments besides “Shadow House” — a public pool drained of water, a fine-dining restaurant occupied by one blank-faced guest, an eerily sterile, lab-like industrial kitchen and an artist's atelier.

As the pair puts it, throughout their 30-year creative partnership, the museums' space itself has acted as their “canvas,” allowing them to blur the lines between public and private spaces, as well as between fine art and spatial design.

In doing so, the duo creates an alluring “universe with no particular rules or logic,” where visitors are invited to navigate different life-size environments, embark on Easter egg hunts for hidden details and form their own interpretations.

Elmgreen & Dragset's "The Cloud" (2024) / Courtesy of the artists and Amorepacific Museum of Art

One of these immersively surreal universes in the Seoul show is “The Cloud,” a fictional upscale fine-dining restaurant.

Here, tables are meticulously set with plates meant to offer high-priced delicacies, yet the only thing present on the dishes is the engraving of the invisible meal's calorie count.

The diner itself is strangely desolate, save for a hyperrealistic sculpture of a solitary female patron. She appears to be on a video call with a friend, but it doesn't take long to find out that this is a one-sided conversation. Her friend on the screen gossips non-stop about his disastrous romantic date, oblivious to her silence.

Elmgreen & Dragset's "The Conversation" (2024) / Courtesy of the artists and Amorepacific Museum of Art

Despite her inability to respond, the woman's unblinking eyes remain glued to the screen — a haunting reflection of our own lives as passive consumers, inundated by the endless stream of digital content. Though the imagery may seem cliche in description, it becomes a visceral experience when confronted with a physical, lifelike stand-in for yourself.

“Most of us today live a kind of simultaneous life. We're here, but we're also somewhere else with all our screens. This parallel reality sometimes makes us doubt what is real and what is not,” Dragset reflected.

“This exhibition is a celebration of experiencing things in a physical way, experiencing it with your body, experiencing it three-dimensionally,” Elmgreen added. “We want to celebrate the idea of being present, the idea of … reclaiming our bodies and their dignity.”

“Spaces” runs through Feb. 23, 2025 at the Amorepacific Museum of Art.

Elmgreen & Dragset's "Untitled (the kitchen)" (2024) / Courtesy of the artists and Amorepacific Museum of Art