Andrea Galvani Lost Garden is now on view in Seoul with a startling proposition: what if extinction could be given shape, color and scale before memory smooths away the fact that something has vanished?
At Tang Contemporary Art’s Seoul space, The Lost Garden of Heaven runs from August 29 through October 10, 2026. The gallery describes it as Galvani’s first solo exhibition in Korea. At its center are 14 botanical towers built from life-size artisanal ceramic replicas of lost and extinct heirloom apples, reconstructed through historical agricultural records and research with farmers, ecologists, pomologists, horticulturalists, historians and “apple hunters.”
When absence becomes material
There is something deeply moving about making a sculpture of a fruit that can no longer be picked. An apple is ordinary enough to disappear into daily life, yet each variety contains generations of cultivation, taste, migration and local knowledge. When a variety disappears, more than a flavor is lost. A relationship between people and place disappears with it.
Galvani’s ceramic replicas turn that absence into something physical. They do not resurrect the fruit. They make its disappearance harder to ignore.
Extinction is a statistic until someone gives absence a body.
Andrea Galvani Lost Garden expands the clock
The exhibition extends its meditation on time beyond plants. Tang Contemporary identifies a video-sculptural work involving the Blue Morpho butterfly, stretching the perception of a brief biological lifespan toward the scale of an average human life. Other elements bring extinct bird calls and scientific language into the installation.
This is not environmental art as illustration. It is closer to an altered ecosystem assembled inside a gallery—part archive, part memorial, part impossible garden. Science supplies evidence, but art changes the emotional temperature of that evidence.
Why biodiversity needs memory
Environmental conversations understandably focus on survival: what can still be protected, restored or changed. Art can also hold space for what is already gone. That function matters because ecological loss can become strangely invisible once the missing species or variety slips outside living memory.
A garden can be beautiful and still function as an archive of loss. The beauty is not a distraction from urgency; it can be the thing that makes us remain with it long enough to care.
The artist as witness and translator
Galvani’s project also demonstrates what becomes possible when an artist treats research not as decoration but as structure. Farmers, historians and specialists become part of the work’s intellectual ecology. Their knowledge enters the sculpture without turning the sculpture into a textbook.
For artists confronting climate and biodiversity, that distinction is important. The task is not merely to repeat information already available elsewhere. It is to find the form that allows us to experience the stakes differently.
The Lost Garden of Heaven gives extinct apples bodies, endangered lives a different clock and vanished birds a place in the room. None of that reverses loss. But it makes forgetting more difficult—and sometimes that is where responsibility begins.
