Sujin Lim: Memories in Red

Inaugurating the 2026 Sunroom Project Space season, Memories in Red transforms the Sunroom into a surreal botanical landscape. Sujin Lim creates an immersive, wall-scale environment using natural red pigment extracted from rugosa rose. The installation honors a plant species native to East Asia that once grew abundantly along the wind-swept shores of Youngheung Island in South Korea, where the artist’s father was born and raised. As the island’s shoreline gradually shifted, the rugosa rose disappeared along with its habitat—an understated yet profound ecological displacement. 

Introduced to the Hudson River shoreline in the mid-19th century to combat erosion, the rugosa rose, thrives in sandy, well-drained, salt-sprayed conditions like those of its original coastal environment. Installed at Wave Hill overlooking the Hudson River—where shorelines are transforming today due to accelerating climate-driven sea-level rise and active ecological restoration—Memories in Red creates a dialogue between loss, displacement, and memory across two distant yet connected landscapes. 

Rooted in Lim’s ongoing exploration of ecological transformation and the afterlives of altered environments, Memories in Red reflects both the fragility of the rugosa rose’s natural habitat and its entanglement with histories of displacement. Each floral imprint functions as both image and record: a sensory trace shaped by ornamental, medicinal, and culinary uses, and by the social, economic, and environmental forces that carry plants across landscapes. As the dyed patterns slowly fade over the course of the exhibition, the work becomes a meditation on impermanence—an ephemeral space where presence and absence coexist. Part archive, part dreamscape, Memories in Red invites viewers to inhabit a landscape that lingers even as it disappears, guided by the rugosa rose 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 rugosa rose 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.