On the 3rd floor of the LCT Landmark Tower, the highest building in Busan, the “City by the Ocean,” there is a shiny silver boat navigating the aerial space of the SIGNIEL BUSAN lobby. This is Leandro Erlich’s “Flying Boat,” gracefully afloat in the middle of the lobby. This boat-shaped object that is paddling not through the water but through the air, renders the difference between reality and fantasy ambiguous, and inspires curiosity and imagination among the viewers. Is it heading somewhere, floating on water? Or is it slowly sinking, keeling over? Would a boat built like that actually float on water? The viewers let their imagination fly in front of the shimmering boat, on the surface of which they can view their distorted reflections. This is precisely how the artist wanted to engage the viewers. Argentine contemporary artist Leandro Erlich has built up an original and creative language to express reality through works that undermine the familiarity of everyday spaces, highlighting the ambiguity between reality and fantasy. The concepts of “illusion and reality,” “fiction and truth,” “visibility and invisibility,” and “existence and nonexistence” are the main themes that make up the artist’s oeuvre.

Argentine-born Leandro Erlich has always been interested in space, influenced by his architect father and geographer mother. He presents works that irreverently subvert the conventional ideas related to perception and stimulate the viewer’s imagination through visual illusions using images reflected in mirrors and other elements. He gained worldwide renown as an artist through works that were at once critically acclaimed and popular with the general public. These works were based on familiar, everyday spaces such as elevators, staircases, and swimming pools, and easily understood and enjoyed by viewers who physically engaged with them. He was selected as the representative artist of the Argentinian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and has been featured in solo exhibitions at some of the world’s leading art museums, including the MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, MoMA PS1, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. His work is held in major museums around the world, including MoMA, the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, and the Israel Museum.