Technology is no longer a tool that lies outside life, but an environment that conditions our senses and relationships. We wake to smartphone alarms, move along routes guided by satellites, and spend our days encountering news selected by algorithms. Within that flow, the ways we remember and relate to one another are also changing. The acts of staying by someone’s side, of caring and leaning on each other, are being reshaped within this new condition. What we linger on, then, is the question of where the force that allows one to remain beside another, even amid a changing world, truly begins.
Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Nanji Residency at the Seoul Museum of Art (Nanji Residency SeMA), AMOR EX MACHINA repositions the word “love” within this question. The exhibition embarks on a journey toward the origin of love―that is, to rediscover the human essence that endures even before the immensity of technological civilization, suggesting that the destination to which we must ultimately return is love itself. At the same time, Amor Ex Machina (“love from the machine”) plays on the classical concept Deus Ex Machina (“god from the machine”). In place of divine intervention, it proposes that in our present world built through technology and mechanical systems, what may still redeem us is love―the fundamental ground of being.
Though we can never fully understand one another, we nevertheless continue to reach out, to care for each other, to lean on one another, and to remain together, even at the risk of being wounded. Compassion, care, interdependence, and connection have long been the ways through which imperfect beings learn to stay beside one another. In an age when technology rewrites the forms of relationships, love reemerges not as a distant abstraction but as a concrete condition that sustains life itself.
The exhibition revisits this condition through archetypal narratives. The wonder and cost of the one who stole fire, the loss and transformation of the one who entrusted memory to a river, and the struggle of the one who returned in an unfamiliar form unfold across scenes of the present. Bodies transform through their entanglement with technology, memories migrate into data, and those who stand outside the system endure the world through their own senses. Stories passed down over long periods do not remain in the past. They become frameworks through which we see the present, while also allowing us to anticipate what has yet to come.
Here, the ancient stories become the language of the now. The artists participating in this exhibition have all passed through the Nanji Residency SeMA over the past twenty years. Their works bear layered traces of the technological environments and shifting sensibilities of their respective times. The time spent rendering, in their own languages, the ways in which technology reshapes the bodies, perceptions, and connections has also been a process of reestablishing the senses and learning how to coexist with others within a transforming world.
What AMOR EX MACHINA ultimately looks toward is the sensibility that continues to make us human even after passing through increasingly refined apparatuses and ever more intricate systems. When ancient stories, contemporary landscapes, and works shaped through the time of Nanji are brought together, love approaches us as a force at work―here and now. Rather than offering love as a singular form, the exhibition invites us to retrace it: like an old journey whose story repeats itself yet arrives at different destinations each time, with each of our own ways.
