A new branch of the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art is under construction and scheduled to open in 2025. The Seo-Seoul Museum of Art is an art museum that imagines a social powerhouse connecting the arts and life. In keeping with the characteristics of southwestern Seoul, where memories of an urban industrial zone in the past and future industries such as information technology (IT) and fashion coexist, the institution will showcase programs tailored to new media, convergence arts, and art education for adolescents and marginalized groups.
Prior to the opening of the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art, the Seoul Metropolitan Government has held a pre-opening public program annually since 2020, thus searching for a vision of the art museum in a multifaceted manner, while constructing concrete strategies in preparation for the opening and establishing the starting point for research projects. Held at the Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, the 2020 Seo-Seoul Museum of Art pre-opening public program “Someday Everyday Everybody” questioned whether or not an art museum that, going beyond space and time limited in reality, created experiences and knowledge through multiple voices was possible. The 2021 Seo-Seoul Museum of Art pre-opening public program “Signaling Perimeters” examined the relationship between the arts and society under the topics of the local community and the media. The 2022 Seo-Seoul Museum of Art pre-opening public program “Exceptional Times, Uncertain Moves” sought to gauge whether contemporary art and art museums could redesign new forms of cultural production and perspectives for experiencing and thinking about them in a dramatically changing environment. In addition, we prepared a basis for critically exploring the operation and tasks of digital culture and discussed problems faced by various art museums and art institutions in a distributed network society.
In its fourth year, the 2023 Seo-Seoul Museum of Art pre-opening public program “A Habitat where the sun sets” will explore various aspects of cities, which are complexes combining the natural environment and artificial objects, and search for methodological reflections on and solidarity regarding artistic production in order to think about a sustainable future on the base of cultural diversity. Through activities including exhibitions, dialogues, performances, and screenings, we will create a temporary platform for sharing diverse ideas and integrating the arts, technology, media, and everyday culture.
Based on the definition of museums as revised by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in 2022, the international forums “Art Museums in Multicultural Cities” (Diversity and Art Museums) will discuss whether art museums can be turned into spaces for new forms of cultural production on the basis of institutional diversity regarding and from an equal approach to disparate cultures such as race, gender, ethnicity, ideology, religion, and/or other identities. In addition, we will examine the cultural topography of southwestern Seoul and pose questions on how topics such as migration, industries, women, caregiving, equality, plurality, and intersectionality can be shared within the arts.
In particular, we will invite educational experts, curators, and public agency staff members in the field of museum art therapy, who heal, embrace, and provide access to viewers with diverse backgrounds through the arts, and explore the direction in which art museums must proceed for the realization of social justice and shared values on the basis of local society.
“Production and Interpretation” will share artists’ research methods and creative processes, engage in dialogues on the contemporary arts and media discourses, and prepare artists’ artwork production environment and the basis for audiences’ understanding and participation. We will prepare time to experience in an artists’ lab the process in which artists’ praxis through artistic research and works is concretized and reified amid various thoughts on materials and reality. In addition, besides discussing experimentation with and expansion of technological changes, formal variations, and aesthetic experiences appearing in the current of evolving from media in an analog environment to those in a digital environment, we will discuss contemporary artistic discourses including ethicality and visuality, self-theorization as a trend in feminism, and queer temporality in experimental cinema.
“The Arts and Education” will ask questions such as “What are the roles of the arts for new ideas?” and “What kinds of knowledge are necessary for next generations to shape the future?” and reexamine activities and experiences of diverse layers regarding the learning that the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art has shared from 2000 to 2023 in collaboration with adolescents, educators, experience designers, and artists. In this process, we will ask again whether it is possible actively to captivate and form solidarity with adolescents as active actors in art museums and search for the direction in which the museum’s education must proceed in the future. In addition, we will examine the various theoretical research and praxis of artists, designers, educators, and curators aiming at educational values at the intersection of the arts and education and continue to explore topics including the contribution of the arts to public education, the educational potentials of artworks, and the participation of the community in contemporary art on the basis of learning.
The intermedia lab at the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art will be planned as an analogue and digital platform through which discussions on trans-locality and community and digital culture and media with people from diverse fields can be expanded while the complexity of cities can be interpreted, and new artworks can be created. Held this year as a pilot program, the intermedia lab’s “Climate Media,” will be operated as a convergent program exploring cities, which are complex habitats where diverse natural elements and artificial objects, traditional bases of life and digital facilities coexist, and addressing the possibility of the coexistence of the past, present, and potential future from a variety of perspectives including space, culture, technology, media, ecology, local society, and environment. In particular, the COVD-19 pandemic, by revealing social, economic, racial, and geographical inequality and hence visualizing the interrelationship among ecological crisis, development model, and human health, has served as an occasion for discussing and activating the urgency of a shift to an ecological society. Faced with environmental changes on the level of world history such as climate crisis and increased migration, we will conduct research on the interrelationship between climate and the media and the intersection of culture, humanities, science, politics, and ecology and explore the imagination and praxis of artists, architects, designers, researchers, educators, curators and activists.
LJ SUNGMIN
Curator, Museum Division, Culture Headquarters, Seoul Metropolitan Government
Hosted by Seoul Metropolitan Government Culture Headquarters, Seoul Museum of Art
