서울시립미술관 SEOUL MUSEUM OF ART

Memories passed down through generations draw the lives of others into the present, yet leave beyond our reach those we cannot truly know and experiences we cannot fully comprehend. Seo-Seoul Museum of Art’s first New Media Emerging Artist Exhibition, The Snake That Cannot Shed, explores this intersection between historical remnants and present perception through the distinct artistic inquiries of Okyoung Noh (Korea) and Serene Hui (Hong Kong). Both artists bring fragments of family memory and surviving traces of individual lives into the realm of present-day perception, each maintaining within her work the absences and distances between past and present.

As part of a pen-pal exchange, Noh and Hui shared the experiences and concerns underlying their respective practices, responding to each other’s questions and further developing their reflections. These interactions prompted a critical re-evaluation of their familiar subject matter and formal approaches, culminating in new commissions. The distance between their trajectories served as a generative space to gauge the reach of their own thinking. Presenting the archival records of their correspondence alongside newly commissioned works, the exhibition highlights how Noh’s and Hui’s practices expand through shared inquiry and mutual relationality.

A snake’s skin functions both as the interface where its body meets the world and as the structure sustaining its form. With growth, the protective layer turns into an uninhabitable boundary. Shedding thus marks a moment where a constitutive structure fractures, allowing latent possibilities to emerge as new sensory forms. Traces of the past likewise take shape through the languages and media that carry them, uncovering previously unacknowledged meanings upon encountering contemporary sensibilities. Recontextualizing what has been passed down from the past within new expressive frameworks, Noh and Hui probe ways to approach lives and experiences that have remained obscured.