A passage is not a place to stay. We pass through it. And yet perhaps it is while passing through, rather than while staying still, that we become most clearly aware of where we are. With Passage: Self-Location, iros.gallery brings together Hyeja, Kris Heide, and Wei Tan in a three-person exhibition exploring how we locate ourselves within the worlds we move through. Each artist approaches this question from a different direction, gauging her own position along the way. In this passage that goes on without end, where do I stand?Three paths cross three different passages. One moves through the city, one between person and person, and one among objects that hold the traces of a life. Yet all three paths converge on the same question.Location is not a destination, but a coordinate that surfaces only briefly as we pass through.

 

Hyeja’s (b. 1970, Seoul; lives and works in Berlin) city never comes to rest in the same image. On rainwater, in windowpanes, on trembling surfaces, it dissolves and reforms again and again. In the moment one no longer knows from where one is looking, the city becomes a landscape — a waking dream in which reality and illusion linger together, undivided, in one place. Hyeja holds a B.F.A. in painting from Chung-Ang University and an M.F.A. in painting from Hongik University. She has held solo exhibitions at Kunstverein L102, Berlin (2025), Galerie Gabriele Paqué, Bonn (2024), and Aram Art Museum, Goyang, developing her urban-landscape series between Seoul and Berlin. She took part in residencies including the Leipzig International Art Programme (LIA, 2013) and Glogau Air, Berlin (2011), and has worked at the BBK studio in Berlin since 2020. Her work is held in the MMCA Art Bank (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea), the Government Art Bank of Korea, and the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA).

 

For Kris Heide (b. 1960, Kiel, Germany; lives and works in Berlin), the passage lies within. Faces she encountered in unfamiliar places are committed to memory, contemplated inwardly, sorted and ordered — only then does the hand begin to move. Some faces meet another within a continuous line: like lovers, or a mother and child, the flowing, unbroken line is itself the continuity of a relationship. Other faces rise slowly out of a grid where colour meets colour, and in the end seek to leave that grid. A place that opens only when all control is released — a place of metamorphosis, where impression turns into form. Kris Heide works across drawing, painting, photography, and installation. She holds a doctorate in art history from the University of Bonn and studied at the Drawing Institute of the University of Tübingen. Long stays across cultures — Kyoto, Shanghai, Seattle, and two years in Malawi — underpin her practice. She has held solo exhibitions at Galerie Peripherie, Tübingen, and HWL Galerie, Düsseldorf, and taken part in group shows at KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2025), and the Anti-War Museum, among others. Her work is held in collections including the Haus des Rundfunks, Berlin.

 

Wei Tan (b. 1991, Malaysia; lives and works in Berlin) paints chairs in place of people. In a life spent moving across continents, rebuilding friendships, routines, and identities each time, the chair is the one anchor that remains. Like the abandoned chairs on Berlin’s streets, waiting for a new owner, it takes on the story of the body that once sat there. Toward a point between abstraction and figuration — a middle she never quite reaches — she keeps walking. Wei Tan holds a Bachelor of Music from King’s College London and a Master’s in Music Technology from New York University. She has held solo exhibitions in Wiesbaden (Incubator, 2022), Penang, and New York, and taken part in group shows in London, Berlin, and Rome, including at Galerie Grolman, Berlin (2025). She completed residencies at the Berlin Art Institute (2017) and Joya: arte + ecología, Spain (2017), and has shown at international art fairs including LA Art Show, London Art Fair, and Aqua Art Miami, as well as the Shingle22j Biennial in Rome (2019).