SANAA’s architecture is often described as modest. It refuses monumentality, avoids heroic gestures, and makes itself easy to overlook. But modesty here is not the absence of design. It is a deliberate withdrawal that reassigns agency to what usually reads as background - light, weather, movement, and the small negotiations of bodies in space. Thin glass, expanded metal, and porous envelopes do not simply “disappear.” They act as membranes: surfaces that receive images, soften edges, and allow inside and outside to leak into each other.
This is where Stan Allen’s notion of “dirty realism” becomes useful. The phrase feels counterintuitive precisely because SANAA is associated with refinement. Yet Allen argues that their work “strip[s] things down…to construct a new form of complexity” - not an irreducible truth, but a complexity adequate to the strange artificial reality of contemporary life. In other words, reduction is not a moral purification. It is a method for producing a more elastic public space, open to the messy realm of activity: waiting, drifting, crossing paths, and being slightly out of place.
Allen is also careful about how we read materials. When SANAA uses expanded metal or industrial mesh, it is not a semiotic costume meant to “represent” a gritty neighborhood. As one discussion of Allen’s essay summarizes, for SANAA, materials are chosen not for their references but for their “optical and social performance” - how they absorb light, modulate distance, and choreograph encounters. Surface, then, is already dramaturgical: it scripts attention and interaction before a single sign is interpreted.
Surface and Affect
If Allen frames this as an architectural ethic of withdrawal, Giuliana Bruno helps articulate why surfaces matter so much to perception and memory. In *Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media*, Bruno treats surface not as a superficial layer applied after form, but as a contact zone where materiality, media, and affect meet. Surfaces hold traces: they gather touch, reflect bodies, absorb light, and fold distance into a readable skin. When a surface reflects, it does not merely duplicate an image. It produces a relation - an edited proximity - where multiple times and positions can be held at once.
Cinematic Composite
A cinematic example makes this legibility explicit. In Kogonada’s film *After Yang* (2021), glass repeatedly destabilizes the boundary between inside and outside, presence and absence. Reflection becomes a compositing device: a father’s figure and his daughter’s image can occupy the same plane even when they stand in different rooms. The overlap does not resolve separation - it intensifies it - yet it also creates a fragile intimacy, a brief shared frame in which memory and longing become visible as spatial phenomena.
Exhibition Scenography as Annotation
This compositing logic is precisely what reflective surfaces can do in exhibition scenography, where the question is not only what visitors see, but how their bodies are positioned in relation to images, objects, and narratives. In 2025, while working on exhibition design at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), I used reflective surfaces not as decorative finishes but as narrative instruments - devices that translate literary and psychological imagination into spatial conditions. Reflection is a way to turn the visitor into a moving annotation: a body that enters the image and is, in return, edited by it.
In *Surrealism and Korean Modern Art* (MMCA Deoksugung, 17 April - 6 July 2025), the exhibition revisited artists and practices historically under-acknowledged within Korean modern art. Within one gallery addressing fragmented bodies, private sensation, and the logics of desire and dream, reflective surfaces were positioned to operate as controlled disruptions. Rather than offering a clean mirror, the surfaces produced partial mirrorings and slight distortions, so the visitor’s body would appear intermittently - sometimes aligned with a work, sometimes split by an edge, sometimes dissolved into glare. In these moments, surrealist fragmentation is not only seen; it is rehearsed by the viewer’s own presence.
A second Deoksugung exhibition commemorating the 80th anniversary of Korea’s liberation - *Landscapes of Homeland and Longing* (14 Aug 2025 - 22 Feb 2026) - foregrounded nostalgia as a historical condition: loss and rediscovery of place, displacement by war and division, survival amid ruins, and the persistence of longing. Here, reflective planes were introduced as interruptions within an otherwise linear historical sequence. As visitors moved through paintings and archival materials, reflection produced brief overlays: the contemporary body passing across images of a homeland that is simultaneously real and absent. The result is not interactivity for its own sake. It is a spatial way of making “nostalgia” legible - as an unstable alignment between what is present and what cannot be fully returned to.
Across these cases, reflectivity does something specific: it holds two realities at once without forcing them into a single stable meaning. It is not merely interactive; it is editorial. It decides when bodies appear, where they appear, and how long the overlap persists. And because the overlap is contingent - dependent on angle, light, crowding, and movement - it remains unstable. That instability is not a flaw. It is the mechanism by which a scenographic space can remain open to multiple readings, like a text that changes when reread.
J. G. Ballard once wrote, “We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind.” The question for spatial practice is how those fictions become operative - how they move from narrative to sensation, from representation to event. Reflective surfaces offer one answer: they translate fiction into a material encounter by turning space into a layered image and the visitor into a moving annotation. In this sense, a reflective plane is not a finish; it is a writing device. It lets exhibition space behave like a page whose meaning is produced by overlap - between image and body, memory and light, distance and touch.