The Seoul Museum of Art presents the GanaArt Collection Beneath Technology: Scenes at the Threshold. SeMA has been organizing a series of planned permanent exhibitions based on approximately 200 Korean realist works from the 1980s–90s, a gift of LEE Ho Jae, Chairman of Gana Art, in 2001. In this iteration, the exhibition focuses on “technology,” presenting 16 works from the SeMA–GanaArt Collection alongside 10 works from the SeMA Collection, and explores the relationship between art, society, and evolving technological environments.
Beneath Technology: Scenes at the Threshold highlights the landscape of Korean society as it took shape amid the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and transformation of the media environment that defined the period of time from the 1970s through the 1990s. Development of technology and industry not only altered modes of material production but also transformed the character of individuals and communities as well as the very ways in which reality was perceived and sensed. As capitalist economic development converged with technological advancement, Korean society achieved remarkable growth, yet behind that growth lay another landscape―one of social fracture. Focusing on the scenes of rapid social change, this exhibition examines how art captured and gave form to the sense of reality and lived experience amid sociocultural upheaval.
The period from the 1970s through the 1990s saw accelerated reorganization: rural populations migrated en masse to explosively expanding cities, while industrial capital and mass media converged to forge a new order. Technology operated not merely as a tool but as a condition that transformed everyday life and experiences. Realist artists of the time did not stop at merely representing circumstances; they sought to expose the structural tensions and ruptures latent beneath the surface. Translating the reconfigured landscapes of daily life and the emotional tenor of the era into visual language, they constructed another order of sensory reality. For them, artistic creation was a critical practice―an inquiry into what aspects of reality to look at and how. The visual culture that unfolded upon the new material foundations of rural and urban reorganization, shifting labor conditions, and the proliferation of consumer culture and mass media served as a significant visual register through which the sense of reality found expression.
The exhibition is organized into three sections, each illuminating a distinct perspective on technology.
Section 1. Amid Flickering Lights
This section captures the fractures of Korean society in transition during the period of intense industrialization and urbanization. The logic of development-driven growth and mass migrations from rural to urban areas destabilized both the foundations of life and the fabric of community, while newly constructed environments failed to provide adequate conditions for life. The shadows cast between the lights of industrialization reveal the reality of an era suspended at the edge of change.
Section 2. The Abyss of a New Order
This section turns its gaze to the relational structures of a society newly formed through the convergence of technology and capital. The urban culture and media environment that grew out of industrialization reorganized social order and systems of value within an atmosphere of material prosperity. Beneath the surface of that glittering reality, however, the logics of consumerism, mass media–driven desire and competition, and the operations of power and capital intersect, casting an invisible sense of tension.
Section 3. Resplendent Void
This section brings to light the accumulated fatigue and emptiness of the individual suppressed beneath the surface of a giant system. In a mechanized society governed by the logic of efficiency and progress, the individual grows increasingly isolated, and labor becomes marginalized. The bright lights produced by technological civilization prompt us to revisit, from beneath its surface, the fundamental questions of human existence that society continues to confront.
Revisiting the technological landscapes of the past, the exhibition offers a broader vantage point from which to survey our own position at the threshold of future technology.
