With No Man’s Land, HAS initiates its first international collaboration, a dialogue between Sweden and Korea, and the beginning of a longer trajectory that reaches across Asia, North America, and Europe. This exhibition is not an endpoint, but a statement of intent: HAS positions itself as a platform where geographies, artistic practices, and histories intersect.

Kyungtaek Lee is a highly regarded Korean artist whose photographic practice investigates the quiet, often unsettling traces of humanity embedded in the landscape. His images depict abandoned artificial structures, remnants of modern civilization left behind, not as ruins of the past, but as active agents in an ongoing relationship between humans, nature, and time. These sites, found across diverse terrains, reveal how human presence alters the world irreversibly, while simultaneously becoming absorbed into it.

Rather than presenting nature as untouched or victorious, Kyungtaek Lee acknowledges its deep and lasting transformation by human action. The photographs operate as meditations on existence, memory, and origin, asking where we come from, what we leave behind, and how meaning persists after function has vanished. In these landscapes, humanity is both absent and undeniably present.

No Man’s Land enters into a lineage of photographic practices that have examined modern civilization’s imprint on nature, from early industrial landscape photography to later conceptual and typological approaches that treat infrastructure, architecture, and terrain as cultural documents. Like these predecessors, Kungtaek Lee does not moralize. Instead, he observes. His images allow time, distance, and silence to speak.

For HAS, this exhibition marks the beginning of a two-way bridge: presenting international artists in Scandinavia, while carrying Swedish and Nordic artistic practices outward into Korea and beyond. It is an ambition rooted in exchange rather than export, in listening as much as showing.