Exhibition Information

2025 150x150cm

2023 32 x 24cm

2025 100x100cm

2018 150x120cm

			Whitestone Gallery Seoul is pleased to present LOST/FOUND, a solo exhibition by Henrik Aa. Uldalen, a Korean-born Norwegian artist. This marks the artist’s first solo presentation in Korea, offering an introspective journey into the roots of his identity and emotional landscape shaped by his experience of being adopted from Korea to Norway.

Having taught himself classical portraiture, Uldalen reinterprets it through a contemporary lens, continuing his work in expressionism. The blurred gazes of the figures in his paintings serve as vessels for emotion rather than literal depictions, capturing feelings of solitude, detachment, and existential unease. In this exhibition, Uldalen evokes the shared sense of loss and separation felt by many Korean adoptees who were sent abroad since the 1950s. Through visceral gestures, dense impasto, and abstract shapes that emerge against crimson backdrops, these emotions take form. His most recent works incorporate finger painting and splattered pigments, reflecting childlike spontaneity as he revisits his early memories. The themes of the paintings shift between innocent moments like "Play" and "Hugs" and more painful reflections such as "Scar Tissue" and "Stolen."

While continuing to explore philosophical questions and experimental techniques that have long defined his practice, LOST/FOUND reveals a more personal and emotional dimension. Rather than recreating specific memories or events, Uldalen confronts their lingering emotional traces. Painting is not just a means of creation for him, but a ritual of confrontation and a tool for inner reckoning. In Korea—a place both unfamiliar and intimately connected—he comes face to face with his own sense of loss and longing, ultimately inviting reflection on the universal question of what it means to exist.