For his first solo exhibition in Asia, the Ghanaian artist collaborated with architect Glenn DeRoche on a site-specific pavilion that stitched together portraiture, memory, and craft traditions from Ghana and Korea.
Courtesy of Wooyang Art Museum. Photo: Gyu Taek Han
In July 2025, the Wooyang Art Museum in Gyeongju opened ‘I Have Been Here Before’, Amoako Boafo’s first solo exhibition in Asia. At its heart was a striking collaboration with architect Glenn DeRoche, founder of DeRoche Projects, who designed a site-specific pavilion that extended Boafo’s portraiture into a sensory architectural encounter. The project marked a continuation of their long-standing creative partnership, spanning past interventions and exhibitions in Accra, London, and Vienna.
The installation placed three new large-scale paintings by Boafo within an environment conceived as much for presence as for looking. Embroidery became the conceptual thread—a shared language between Ghanaian and Korean traditions. Ghanaian smocks and ceremonial garments, stitched with intricate meaning, found echoes in Korean jasu, once reserved for royal attire and domestic textiles. Both practices framed embroidery as a form of memory in motion: gestures passed from hand to cloth, from one generation to the next.
Boafo’s new paintings directly engaged these ideas. “The new works in the pavilion explore how clothing can carry meaning by connecting what we wear to identity and tradition,” he explained. “I was interested in how these ideas show up in both Ghanaian and Korean culture, and in finding new ways to express that through my paintings.”
DeRoche translated this conceptual foundation into space. The pavilion drew inspiration from the Adinkra symbol Nsaa, representing authenticity and excellence, while its spatial rhythm recalled the open yet inward-facing courtyards of traditional Korean hanok homes. Visitors entered through a defined threshold, encountered Boafo’s portraits in sequence, and arrived finally at a moment of stillness: a recessed central bench beneath suspended, softly backlit embroidered linen panels.
Courtesy of Wooyang Art Museum. Photo: Gyu Taek Han
Every element was designed to heighten sensory awareness. The scent of stained red South Korean pine drifted through the air, while the floor carried the patterned timber geometry of local hanok architecture. A quiet recording of spoken word played only when seated on the central bench, audible as a near-whisper—an intimate invitation to reflect while gazing upwards at the floating textiles.
As DeRoche described: “Designing this pavilion was about creating a space where stillness could be felt, not just seen. We wanted to offer visitors an experience that slows perception and opens up space for reflection through architecture, material, and memory. By drawing on shared traditions of embroidery from Ghana and South Korea, the space becomes a meeting point between cultures, and between body and art.”
The result was a pavilion that functioned less as display architecture and more as a distillation of Boafo’s artistic concerns. Portraits of presence—rooted in gesture, identity, and adornment—were mirrored by an environment that invited careful attention to material and memory. Like embroidery itself, the installation accumulated meaning through layers of detail: a stitch here, a gesture there, each contributing to a larger whole of resonance across cultures.
The exhibition, which runs through November 2025, signals a new chapter in Boafo and DeRoche’s collaboration: one where painting and architecture extend each other’s reach, creating shared spaces for encounter, reflection, and community.
