In Shape of Land, the Chicago-based designer Sung Jang evokes locations that have personal meaning for him and abstracts them into dream places. Finding a deep resonance in cartography, Jang knows maps aren’t simply navigational tools, but more metaphorically, help us situate ourselves and understand our histories. At the city’s Volume Gallery, Jang’s show of objects and paintings — a six-panel screen and wall works of acrylic on linen, textured with inked sand — draws on his Korean heritage, with imagery that resembles continents and an imaginary topography of mountains and rivers. Jang was particularly inspired by maps from Korea’s Middle Joseon period — depictions of the world more valuable for their artistic and interpretive quality than their precision and utility.

The paintings are accompanied by Jang’s Given series of pieces made of wood and found stone. Geometric structures of intersecting oak planes cradle a sheared off boulder of granite or nephrite jade, marked with the latitude, longitude, and time at which Jang discovered them. These sculptural works embody a back and forth between nature and humans. And they’re a way of exploring the enduring puzzles of time and space, memory and identity: Placing the stone in a specific moment and a position creates a relational frame of reference for other moments, other positions. They’re also simply beautiful to contemplate. Shape of Land is on view through April 12, 2025.