Sujin Lim: Memories in Red

Sujin Lim inaugurates the 2026 Sunroom Project Space season with Memories in Red, an immersive installation that transforms the Sunroom into a surreal botanical memory. Using natural red dye extracted from boiled hibiscus petals, the artist will hand-paint the walls of the Sunroom with imagery of hibiscus flowers, stems and leaves, creating a wall-scaled environment that honors a plant species dispersed across tropical regions worldwide.

Rooted in Lim’s ongoing exploration of loss, ecological transformation, and the afterlives of altered landscapes, Memories of Red reflects the hibiscus flower’s fragility, brief season, and historical ties to migration. Each floral imprint serves as both image and record — a sensory trace of a species shaped by ornamental, medicinal, and culinary histories, as well as by the social, political, and environmental forces that carry plants across borders.

As the dye naturally fades over the course of the exhibition, the installation becomes a meditation on impermanence—an ephemeral space where visitors encounter what is present and absent at once. Part archive and part dreamscape, Memories of Red invites viewers to inhabit a landscape that lingers even as it disappears, guided by the hibiscus flower’s scent, materiality, and more-than-human perspective.

PUBLIC PROGRAM: 

Saturday, June 6, 3:00PM, Meet the Artist: Sujin Lim in dialogue with Curator of Visual Arts Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger followed by an artist-led workshop using hibiscus as material.

Organized by Curator of Visual Arts Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, the Sunroom Project Space is an open call opportunity for New York-area artists to develop and exhibit a site-specific project as a solo exhibition. The 2026 applications were reviewed by a panel of arts professionals including Klaudia Ofwona Draber, a curator, Strategy Consultant, Director of Programs at Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, and founder of KODA—a social practice residency for mid-career artists; 2025 Sunroom Project Space artist Magdalena Dukiewicz, whose practice is rooted in processes and materials that explore the intersections of the organic and industrial materials; and Gugelberger.