Buro Stedelijk is pleased to present Every Worm Trampled Is a Star, the first European solo exhibition by Amsterdam-based artist Aram Lee.
Centred on Seoul's former Yongsan military base, the project imagines the voice and memory of the land itself. Through fragmented narratives, it traces memories held within the soil: displaced communities, buried microorganisms, erased landscapes, and the many attempts to occupy, map, flatten, and heal the site across generations.
For 138 years, the land of the Yongsan military base was cut off from its surrounding communities through histories of colonisation, war, and military occupation. Once used as the headquarters of the Japanese Imperial Army during Japan’s colonial rule of Korea (1910–1945), and later as a U.S. military garrison (1945–2018), the 750-acre site is now in the process of being opened to the public.
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image: Installation view, SONGEUN Art Award. Courtesy of SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation. -
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image: Behind the scenes, Aram Lee, 'Every Worm Trampled Is a Star', 2026 -
image: Behind the scenes, Aram Lee, 'Every Worm Trampled Is a Star', 2025
At the centre of the exhibition is a video that imagines the voice and memory of the land itself. Through fragmented narratives, the work traces memories held within the soil: displaced communities, buried microorganisms, erased landscapes, and the many attempts to occupy, map, flatten, and heal the site across generations. Narrated by a third-generation Zainichi (Koreans and their descendants who moved – or who were forced to move to Japan during the period of Japanese colonial rule), the work follows intertwined histories of displacement, ecological change, and the site's gradual return to public use.
In the entrance, a topographic wall installation developed in dialogue with Rotterdam-based landscape architects West 8 (whose proposal won the bid to re-develop Yongsan site) envisions the recovery of the site's topography as part of its transformation into South Korea's first national urban park. For this presentation, Lee has expanded the work with Stars and Worms, a suspended glass installation, where voices, sounds from the landscape, and recordings from inside the soil resonate through glass as fragile vibrations.
In Aram Lee’s work, the trampled worm stands in for lives, memories, and forms of knowledge rendered vulnerable or invisible, yet capable of cosmic transformation.
This exhibition marks the first presentation of Lee's 2026 SONGEUN Art Award Grand Prize-winning titular video work as a spatial installation.
Aram Lee
is an Amsterdam-based artist, filmmaker, writer, and educator. Grounded in feminist materialist thinking, her practice examines how histories of power, militarisation, and institutional knowledge are embedded within landscapes, bodies, and ecological matter. Working across moving image, installation, and research-based projects, she draws on oral histories, scientific inquiry, and site-specific investigation to reveal marginalised narratives and alternative ways of understanding place.
Photo by Fransisca Angela
Collaborators
