The Leeum Museum of Art presents Gabriel Orozco Garden, a new site-specific installation by Gabriel Orozco, on the museum’s outdoor deck. 

As Leeum’s first commissioned garden, the project redefines the deck as public ground – a living environment in which walking, lingering, and the passage of seasonal time constitute the primary medium of the work. In doing so, it opens the museum to its surrounding urban context as a new public garden shaped by use, time, and continual transformation.

In this garden, Orozco introduces, for the first time in his practice, a conceptual layer drawn from East Asian tradition: the “Three Friends of Winter” (歲寒三友) – pine, bamboo, and plum. These three plants, which sustain the garden through the harshest season with restraint, form both the botanical framework and conceptual backbone of Gabriel Orozco Garden. Here, sustainability takes precedence over flourish, and endurance over spectacle.

As the term “friends” (友) suggests, the garden is conceived not as a place to be looked up at in isolation, but as a shared public space in which to dwell together. 

space, materials, and planting

The structure of the garden is based on the motif of circular arrangements that permeates Orozco’s practice. A geometric pattern originating from a single circle expands across the approximately 1,653m2 deck, linking circles of varying sizes to form a continuous sequence of interconnected spaces from Plaza 1 through Plaza 10. Each plaza is defined by a distinct combination of paving, pattern, planting, and seating, giving rise to its own atmosphere.

The material palette is deeply rooted in the local context. Custom-cut Boryeong stone, quarried in Boryeong city, Chungcheongnam-do, was laid to form a circular pattern across the deck. The original jarrah wood from the previous deck was repurposed as exterior cladding for the building, extending the project’s material cycle through reuse.

The building’s wood-clad exterior, the circular stone paving, and the surrounding landscape extending toward Namsan Mountain converge to create a singular impression: the deck appears as a garden floating above the city.

completing a garden trilogy: london → mexico city → seoul

Gabriel Orozco Garden marks the third and most comprehensive chapter in the artist’s decade-long engagement with the garden as a sculptural medium. This trajectory began in 2016 at the South London Gallery, where Orozco transformed a neglected site into a permanent garden defined by intersecting geometries. From 2019, he led the master plan for Chapultepec Park in Mexico City—an 800-hectare urban project—culminating in a public sculpture on an urban scale. At Leeum, Orozco builds upon the accumulated insights of these preceding projects.

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+ about Gabriel Orozco

+ about Gabriel Orozco Garden