AYAKO ROKKAKU
Mountains of Nameless Emotions

Ayako Rokkaku arrives in Seoul in the early fall of 2024 with a scale model of her sculptural installation, at a moment when the city is still saturated with green. Over the months that follow, she lives and works in Seoul as the city shifts gradually through the seasons. Trees around the studio and the nearby hills turn from green to orange, the light thins, the air grows sharper, and winter eventually announces itself with the first snowfall. This slow, continuous transformation unfolds alongside her daily work, becoming inseparable from the rhythm in which the installation takes shape.The conceptual origin of MOUNTAINS OF NAMELESS EMOTIONS belongs to a longer trajectory within Rokkaku’s practice. Months earlier, during a residency at CCA Andratx, she was surrounded by mountains whose presence is constant and physically grounding. At the same time, she studies images of the exhibition space in Seoul, situated near Namsan Mountain. The idea of creating a mountain within the gallery emerges gradually through this dialogue between landscapes, distance, and anticipation, rather than as a fixed image or defined plan.

Once in Seoul, Rokkaku immerses herself in the city’s material landscape. In the early stages of her stay, she spends long, repeated days at Dongdaemun, navigating its vast network of corridors and stalls.The Dongdaemun Fabric Market is a large-scale textile district in central Seoul, supplying fabrics and sewing materials to the city’s fashion industry. Spread across multiple buildings and streets, it offers a wide selection of textiles — from basic cottons to silks, lace, and technical fabrics — as well as buttons, zippers, and trims. The market serves professional designers, manufacturers, and students, and many shops operate late at night to accommodate fast production cycles, reflecting Dongdaemun’s role as a practical, working backbone of South Korea’s fashion system.

Rolls of textile are stacked densely from floor to ceiling, forming walls of color, weight, and texture. Wool, fleece, artificial fur, felt, and cotton appear in endless variations, offering a tactile abundance that calls for slow looking and careful touch.Her selection of materials is guided by physical sensation rather than conceptual hierarchy. She chooses fabrics for their capacity to hold volume, to fold and compress, to resist and soften through handling.

The making of the installation unfolds over two months of sustained, physically demanding handwork. Each day is shaped by repetitive gestures: cutting, sawing, stitching, tying, and weaving. Every small figure is hand-sawn individually. Every piece of fabric is cut by hand, without templates or mechanical repetition. Long threads of wool are stitched and interlaced, forming dense, layered surfaces that slowly expand across the studio. Hours of labor remain visible within the work, embedded in its density, its weight, and its irregularity.

Rather than constructing the mountain according to a predetermined form, Rokkaku allows it to emerge gradually through a process. The structure grows incrementally, shaped by repetition and duration. Its scale and complexity are the direct result of accumulated labor, where time is not concealed but materially present. The mountain carries the trace of countless hours spent shaping, adjusting, and responding to what has already formed.

Throughout this process, Rokkaku remains attentive to emotional states that accompany the act of making. In her practice, emotions—whether positive or negative—are not experienced as stable or clearly separable entities. They exist instead as layered, shifting accumulations that resist naming. This understanding of emotion has long informed her work, and the mountain becomes a particularly resonant metaphor for this condition. Just as a mountain forms through countless deposits over time, emotional experience gathers gradually, without clear boundaries or labels.As the installation takes shape, these nameless emotional states unfold through the physical act of making itself—registered through the movement of hands, the resistance of materials, and the steady repetition of labor. The mountain does not illustrate emotion, nor does it symbolize a single feeling. Instead, it gives form to emotional density: an accumulation that cannot be reduced, isolated, or fully described.

At the center of the installation stands the monumental mountain structure, composed of innumerable fabric elements, no two identical. A large, creature-like figure rests at its summit, overseeing the landscape below. Surrounding the mountain are eight smaller sculptures, each individually constructed through the same intensive hand process. These figures are not secondary elements, but extensions of the mountain’s emotional terrain—each one bearing its own density, posture, and presence. Together, they form a constellation around the central structure, reinforcing the sense of an inhabited landscape shaped through care, repetition, and time.Throughout her months in Seoul, the city remains an understated but constant counterpart to the work. Seasonal changes outside the studio mirror the layered accumulation taking place within it. The sculptural mountain inside the gallery resonates with the surrounding hills of the city, establishing a dialogue between external geography and internal states.This extended period of observation, material exploration, and sustained manual labor culminates in MOUNTAINS OF NAMELESS EMOTIONS, Ayako Rokkaku’s solo exhibition at KÖNIG SEOUL in December 2024. Reflecting on her practice, Rokkaku states, “I hope people see my words, and the works can touch the nameless emotion inside them.” This aspiration lies at the core of her work. The installation creates a space where unspoken emotions can be encountered without explanation, offering viewers an environment of shared, resonant silence. Within this landscape, fragments of individual inner worlds can be recognized, held, and experienced—finding connection and solace in emotions that remain unnamed, yet deeply shared.