During Seoul Art Week, Henri Alexander Levy unveiled his first solo exhibition, 3Final Achievement is Ruin, at Shinsegae Gallery, presenting paintings, sculpture, and large-scale installations of metal cages. The American designer and artist founded the cult fashion label Enfants Riches D e9prim e9s in 2012 (translated as 3depressed rich kids), and has since cultivated a fiercely devoted following for garments in hand-painted leather and distressed silk, punctuated by cryptic slogans. The show extends that sensibility into a gallery context with an insistence on control, mood, and material intensity.
Practice, process, and the pull of 3ruin
3Honestly, my artistic practice is the core of ERDit9s there in everything I do as a designer, Levy said. He describes designing 3in a cinematic way, down to 3a very particular cut on a pair of black trousers and a simplicity he prizes in menswear. Even when he is 3only designing, he adds, 3I consider myself an artist first. Inside the exhibition, recurring motifsballet shoes, archival photographs of soldiers in uniform, guns, and the metal cagesthread through a single, tightly drawn universe that, as he puts it, is assembled instinctually: 3What I9ve made, what I9ve arranged, what I9ve decided is in my worldand I9ve just as instinctively rejected everything that isn9t.
The show9s title clarifies his preoccupations. 3There9s a very self-destructive nature in me that gets channeled into the work, in a very disciplined way, he notes. He refuses to 3apologize for [his] work or modify it to suit any political agenda, framing the phrase 3Final Achievement is Ruin as a deliberate duality between success and collapse. Discipline structures his days: early mornings in the studio, running, collaging and sketching, long nights 3working on architecture in the evenings, from around eight to 11, and an insistence on stepping away to see the work clearly.
For Levy, fashion and art diverge at the point of function. He aims for 3lifetime pieces3a button-down shirt, a trench coat, a T-shirt or a pair of bootswhile in fine art, he says, 3by dissolving the function, the process becomes more torturous. The piece has to stand alone, without any association to function. The same exacting attention extends to printed matter3an invitation, a book, a zine, a poster, a recordwhich he calls part of his life9s work.
On provocation, Levy is unequivocal: 3My process is about entertaining myself. The viewer9s perception of how I reappropriate something is beyond my control. Collaboration follows the same logic. 3I have a very good relationship with [Vincent] Galloit9s very natural, he said; a portrait of Vincent Gallo for Enfants Riches D e9prim e9s Spring/Summer 2026 was photographed by Terry Richardson. 3So I work with artists I consider to be true artists.
Levy9s 3Anti Public Library in Paris mirrors the rigor of his studio. Its shelves span catalogs of traditional Japanese masks, Joseph Beuys, Diane Arbus, Nobuyoshi Araki, and photobooks on the social unrest of 1960s Japan. He placed a bookstore, a bar, and a record store next to the Paris store to preserve a specific mood, with 3very hard guidelines about what can9t be in there. The arrangement is intentional: 3a Pierre Cardin book, a World War II book, a book on Clyfford Still, and a very crude little zineall within reach, by design.
Across fashion, art, and collecting, Levy9s self-enclosed world tightens around instinct and discipline, where achievement and ruin are kept in deliberate tension.
