2025 SeMA Project A

2025 SeMA Project A is a program that exhibits collections permanently on the Rooftop garden and other underused areas, where the inner and outer spaces of the Art Archives, Seoul Museum of Art interlock. It also supports new commissions yearly, offering an opportunity to interpret and discover the museum space with a fresh perspective. This year, aligning with the institution’s agenda ‘action’ and the exhibition agenda ‘planet,’ the project provides a room for audiences to explore issues of social disasters, climate crisis, and emotional anxiety, while engaging with how the artists react. 

Presenting newly commissioned works by Omyo Cho and Wonwoo Lee, alongside Ryu Biho’s existing work from SeMA’s collection, 2025 SeMA Project A unfolds in various locations of the museum. Omyo Cho’s “Wait, This Can’t Be It.”, installed on the second-floor Rooftop garden of the Collaborating Space, warns of the threat posed by climate change. Envisioning a future life amidst Earth's ever-changing environment, it subtly reveals the potential lying in the future. Wonwoo Lee’s Dancing Star, situated on the third floor of the Collaborating Space, whimsically unravels one’s emotional anxiety towards an uncertain future. Here, Lee’s sculpture, resembling paper cutouts, creates a theatrical scenery in dialogue with an installation opposite from it, Hong Myung-Seop’s scissor silhouette work De-veloping Silhouette Casting. Located on the first floor of the Exchanging Space, Ryu Biho’s video A Man Who Became a Landscape offers a poetic echo, metaphorizing our lives as we survive through social disasters and tragic destinies, which repeat themselves. 

Omyo Cho, “Wait, This Can’t Be It.”, 2025 

Through transformative sculptures and installations, as well as her own science fiction novels, Omyo Cho visualizes futuristic environments and entities, envisioning an alternative existence in the distant future after humanity’s disappearance. “Wait, This Can’t Be It.” conceives a new form of future species adapted to a constantly shifting Earth. The artist creates an interwoven landscape of the artificial and the natural by rendering industrial materials like glass and metal alongside organic wood in sculptural formats. The unified disparate materials metaphorically reveal the restorative and adaptive power inherent within the ecosystem. By showing the processes of organisms being melted and clotted in iteration at extreme temperatures, it portrays how the organisms have consistently evolved over time in order to survive. The sculpture's surface, composed of aluminum and glass, resembles the wriggling shapes of organism veins or flowing neurons, signifying that this sculpture itself was once a living entity―it bears the remnants of its melted and clotted states. Situated in the Rooftop garden of the Art Archives, this sculpture, conceived in bizarre configurations, symbolizes the landscape of the future. Stimulated by ecological imagination, it marks the momentum of what will persist once humans are gone from the planet. 

Wonwoo Lee, Dancing Star, 2025 

Through various mediums including installations, sculptures, performances, and videos, Wonwoo Lee presents scenes that whimsically evoke the fragments of life, creating fissures in familiar realities. By summoning symbols of luck―clover, heart, and star―to navigate the anxiety of our generation's unforeseen futures, the artist presents an installation in which the stars themselves appear to dance, infused with wit, humor, and irony. In Dancing Star, the artist places the stars in the garden to enliven the surroundings and invites audiences to dance around them at the Rooftop of Art Archives SeMA, a space that shares the mountain terrain with the Pyeongchang-dong neighborhood. Derived from the childhood activity of origami―cutting and folding papers―this work, part of a series, features three distinct stars with different colors on the front and back. Stars dancing together, back-to-back, evoke visual rhythms with their vivacious movements and contrasting hues.

Hong Myung Seop, De-veloping-Silhouette Casting, 1984-2010

For De-veloping-Silhouette Casting, an iron plate has been cut along a silhouette of scissors and raised upright. Existing at the boundary between image and illusion as both the independent shape (presence) of the scissors and the evidence (absence) of the iron plate’s trimming, the work embodies an aesthetic of deconstruction as it liberates the object from fixed perceptions. Artist Hong Myung Seop uses words such as “affinity” and “trigger” to explain the encounters between artist and artwork and between artwork and viewer. As an artist, he pursues liberation from all the predefined values associated with art. De-veloping, the name he has adopted for his series, takes its motif from the word “develop” as an etymological antonym of “envelop.” In his work, he uses the words “en-veloping” and “de-veloping” as mutual opposites, consistently demonstrating an artistic perspective that aspires toward an aesthetic of “-less.”

Hong Seok Ho, An iron plate fold, 2000

Incorporating the characteristics of its iron plate materials, An Iron Plate Fold illustrates the aesthetic experiment of an artist who is seeking to minimize his own activities of deliberate “creation.” Artist Hong Suk Ho has attempted to discover the values within the relationships among objects whose coexistence may be seen as impossible that eventually come to coexist over time and lengthy processes. To give visual expression to this artistic perspective, he separates his plate into surfaces of different sizes, allowing the creation of a space through the interactions of contact points that arise in the surfaces when folded. A sense of tension is introduced through the misalignments between surfaces, while a quality of visual dynamism arises from the dividing of distinctive surfaces. The angles of folding and truncations found on the different surfaces are such that the surfaces’ edges rest upon or askew with each other―but they also illustrate the single principle that causes the shape to work.

Kim Inkyum, Emptiness, 2006

Eliciting an optical illusion effect of alternating between two and three dimensions, Emptiness shows the infinite space that exists between the physical presence of the artwork and the setting in which it is placed. One of the work’s surfaces is entirely flat, but the other has a round space encircled by sculptural planes, offering a glimpse of empty space. Artist Kim Inkyum leaves the volume and mass of the traditional sculpture behind completely, using the shaping of surfaces in stainless steel to present “emptiness” rather than the occupying of space. In the process, he guides us beyond the place where we are physically present and into a space of contemplation. This “emptiness” also becomes the empty space in every new landscape where the artwork is placed, providing a new canvas to capture that environment.

Ryu Biho, A Man Who Became a Landscape, 2015

Centering on digital media, Ryu Biho critically examines societal incidents and issues in contemporary society, posing sharp questions through his works. A Man Who Became a Landscape portrays a person’s back transformed into a part of nature, like trees, grass, and water within a landscape. As if waiting or persisting, the person’s back radiates a firm presence in a tranquility that even seems able to halt the passage of time. This work demonstrates the artist’s agony towards disasters in contemporary society, caught between anger and sadness, forgetting and longing, and suffering and waiting. It shows the stance of a sage who defies and endures the tragic destiny of the present.

Photo: HONG Cheolki