SeMA Public Space Project Coupling
SeMA public space project Coupling is a space commission project by three promising artists, installed in public spaces that include the facade and the first floor lobby of the Seosomun main branch, exploring the themes of daily life and nature, illusion and irony at the interface of contemporary sensitivity. Through the spatial project that connects everyday life and art while transforming it into artistic (un)usefulness, an attempt at a more flexible expansion of contemporary art is made.
○ Wonwoo Lee, The most truthful mouth in the world, 2024
Seeking to create a light fissure in the familiar reality by utilizing the codes of humor he found in life, Wonwoo Lee sculpts with non-sculptures through “situational sculptures” where he constantly intervenes in the daily lives of the viewers and evokes them. The most truthful mouth in the world is a work that takes its motif both from the Mouth of Truth statue featured in the film ‘Roman Holiday’ and from the architecture of the Seoul Museum of Art, which was formerly the Supreme Court building. Inspired by the classical facade arch, the main architectural feature of the Seoul Museum of Art, the work creates a new awareness of the place by drawing the movement of the viewers itself into the work. Through the interaction with audiences by the artist’s performance, it questions about the meaning of the truth for modern individuals and about the significance and role of artworks and museums as well.
○ Jang Jongwan, Prophecy Between the Columns, A Flying Leaflet, The Farmer's Tail, Hanging Happiness, Melon Mushrooms, 2024
Jang Jongwan presents kitschy paintings without artificial sophistication with his uniquely warm yet cynical perspective. In the fable the artist himself has created, we are confronted with the earnest desire of humans for salvation, their blind and mad faith, and the sense of disconnect that eventually returns when we are faced with the anxiety of reality. Through this project, objects such as a fox scarf, an animal’s tail, a bat, a mushroom and 'leather paintings' made on the inner skin of leather become unfamiliar objects that encounter the viewers throughout the museum.
○ Choi Soo Jung, Invitation to a Journey: Madison County X_ Blue Rock Desert 1999, 2024
Choi Soo Jung experiments with the conditions of traditional painting -the canvas- and with the painting methods to overcome it. Invitation to a Journey(2024), the title inspired by Baudelaire’s poem, is a work that spatially expands and reinterprets Madison County X(2023), which was presented as a monument to intense memory, and Blue Rock Desert 1999, which evokes the event of the journey to the desert, using 3D printing and diffraction films. The work is newly presented in the museum’s lobby space on the right side. Through this, it questions the way of being of memory, and the complex and ever-changing nature of human emotions, memories, and relationships.
