The once culturally peripheral southwestern Seoul now houses the capital's first public museum dedicated to new media art in Geumcheon-gu.
Seo-Seoul Museum of Art, the region’s sole public art museum, comes after more than a decade of preparation. It completes the city’s museum network as the eighth branch of Seoul Museum of Art, following the opening of the Seoul Museum of Photography in Dobong-gu last year.
“In preparing for the museum’s opening, we have been exploring the boundaries of new media,” said Curator Kwon Hye-in at the press opening on Thursday. “Rather than simply referring to digital technology or emerging tools, the museum will embrace works that experiment with the concept of boundaries itself.”
Though new media is often associated with immersive digital exhibitions or cutting-edge technologies, the museum will present artistic experiments across diverse media, encompassing both material and immaterial forms, according to the museum.
The museum currently holds 72 artworks created after 2000, collected over the past three years. Ten selected artworks from the museum’s collection will be shown to the public for the first time at the inaugural exhibition “The Transparent, Adolescent, Machine of Western Seoul.”
Two other inaugural exhibitions include “SeMA Performance: Breathing,” which brings together 27 artists and collectives to explore the intersections of body, society and art under the theme of “breathing;” “Founding Archive Exhibition: Mneme Topos” sheds light on the story of the museum’s founding and narratives of time inscribed in the southwestern Seoul.
“We plan to continue researching institutional guidelines for collecting and managing digital works, while working closely with artists to further develop the details,” the curator said.
Each year, the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art will develop research programs in efforts to identify and interpret the challenges facing contemporary museums and will run the Media Lab as a creative laboratory for artists to experiment with new forms of artistic practices.
The 7,186-square-meter museum — designed by Kim Chan-joong, an award-winning architect and founder of The System Lab — is stretched along the path of Geumnarae Central Park. The low-rise building, consisting of two basement levels and one above-ground floor, creates a forecourt and a rear garden within the park landscape.
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