서울시립미술관 SEOUL MUSEUM OF ART

The Seoul Museum of Art presents internationally renowned contemporary artist Ernesto Neto as part of its 2025 SeMA Public Space Project. His new work Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of Eternal Polarities is a large-scale installation spanning the lobby and open spaces of the Seosomun Main Branch. Composed of industrial cotton fabrics―brown evoking tree trunks and night and pink symbolizing flowers and day―woven into a crochet structure and filled with locally sourced guava leaves and tea leaves, the work offers an immersive sensory experience.

This new commission imbues the museum’s predominantly linear architecture with an unfamiliar yet invigorating vitality, creating a cyclical sense of space and time in which center and periphery, interior and exterior are in constant transformation. The title Ba Ka Ba is an onomatopoeic expression whose first and last syllables are the same, symbolizing rhythms, cycles, and flows of vitality that traverse boundaries. It embodies a condition in which the human body and space, sensation and thought, the self and others, and nature and civilization intersect and form relationships, ideas that Neto has continually explored throughout his practice.

The spirit of the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement, rooted in sensory engagement, participation, and subjective experience, is reimagined in today’s urban space through Neto’s work, expanding the possibilities of artistic expression. Since 2020, the Seoul Museum of Art has developed its public spaces as sites of experimentation, exploring ways for art to permeate everyday life. 2025 SeMA Public Space Project: Dance of Eternal Polarities aims to create a place where the museum meets the life of the city, awakening the senses and revealing new possibilities for art in daily life.