SPACE April 2026 (No. 701)
Installation view of SSMAP 2024–2026 CHAPTER. 1 (left) by Kim Taedong and Seoseoulpedia–AR Moving Images (right) by Shin Jisun. SSMAP 2024‒2026 CHAPTER. 2 is scheduled to be unveiled in Part 2 of the exhibition. ©Bang Yukyung
Seo-Seoul Museum of Art
Mar. 12 – July12, 2026
The Seo-Seoul Museum of Art (hereinafter Seo SeMA), which is Seoul’s first new media focused art museum and first public art museum to be established in Seoul’s southwestern region, opened its doors on the 12th of March. It has been a decade since the project was first announced in 2015. On its opening day, each exhibition hall of Seo SeMA – which was designed under the concept of a ‘Museum in a Park’ – was packed with huge crowds amid intense media coverage. Aside from the exhibition of construction records at the lobby and outdoor space, performances and large-scale commissioned works that reflected the museum’s focus on new media were showcased in outdoor and basement spaces. We examined how Seo SeMA’s exhibition and museum space mirrored its key interests toward ‘new media art, local culture, and accessibility’.
An Exhibition Built Upon the Strata of Relationships, Space, and Time
The exhibition of construction records titled ‘Mnene Topos’▼1 is an archival project that reflects on the museum’s building process and retraces the temporal narrative and memory of Seoul’s southwestern region. Five artists (teams) that work across media such as photography, video, and augmented reality participated in this exhibition. The exhibition begins inside Studio 1 (which is located at the end of a narrow corridor in the lobby on the first floor) and, by utilising the museum’s interstitial space, extends into the outdoor area. The first space to be encountered is a brightly green-lit room of moving images (augmented reality) designed by Shin Jisun. The artist drew upon the history of Seoul’s southwestern region – which has undergone transformations such as the conversion of rural areas into urban industrial zones, the restoration of the Anyangcheon Stream, the development of G-Valley, and the construction of large-scale apartment complexes – as well as the memories of its past inhabitants. Seoseoulpedia, which is a five-part series, focused on the ecological environment – such as the mountains that have steadfastly held their ground amid the rapidly changing urban landscape, the fish that returned after the restoration of the once-polluted Anyangcheon Stream, and the trees that protected the village – while also reconstructing the narrative of an individual who lived in the neighbourhood via a mockumentary. The photographic works of Kim Taedong and VNR▼2 are presented in the adjacent space separated by a single wall. Kim Taedong not only documented each phase of the construction process of the museum building via photographs but also displayed large-scale portraits of the workers involved in the project to disclose the narrative of labour accumulated within the museum. One distinctive feature of this exhibition space is that it has been partitioned using temporary construction structures, enhancing the sense of being on-site.
The exhibition of construction records also extends to the museum’s outdoor spaces including the building’s exterior walls and the lawn courtyard. Two works from VNR’s The Grand Tour serie...
