2018 SeMA Artist Guild is one of the artist support programs of Seoul Museum of Art that began in 2015. In celebration of its 4th year, ‘SeMA Artist Guild’ was designed with the purpose to establish an institutional platform where artists could continue in their creative endeavors.
2018 SeMA Artist Guild invites artist collectives who cross the boundaries of artistic practices, and organizes a new platform for communication to exchange and share knowledge and experience in artistic practices. The event is composed of a 3-day event where sales and participating programs take place and a 4-week exhibition.
This project focuses on 7 artist collectives that proactively respond to recently shifting creative environments and regard each individual collectives as a laboratory that connect particular art contents with a concrete aspect of life. The subtitle ‘Ten Thousand Labs (萬Lab)’ that implicates the artists and their working conditions is a reflection of their professionalism and proficiency not only in art but also in other relevant fields. To perpetuate the creative activities in contemporary society, these artist groups collaborate, combine, or part between people, medium, and networks when necessary to cross between art and life. We attempt to observe their moves that expand the scope of art through forms of sharing, exchange, and promotion of an artist guild.
The three-day event of 2018 SeMA Artist Guild introduces the activity of each artist collective and lets them share or exchange in material and immaterial items. During The 4-week exhibition that went along the three-day event, ‘artist talk’ programs had taken place to introduce each collectives’ major activities, to facilitate not only the exchange of an object but also the sharing of the artists’ knowledge and experience. I hope this project will question the spectrum of artistic practices and motivate thinking about how their artistic activities can be experienced, shared, and extended in a broader sense.
* Ten Thousand Labs(萬Lab), pronounced Manlaeb in Korean is a word play on ‘Full Level(滿Level)’, also pronounced Manlaeb in Korean, which is an online game term used to refer to the character reaching the peak level. (Source: The National Institute of the Korean Language, Open Dictionary)
