Open-Air Museum_Pungnap
2024. 8. 16 - 2024. 10. 13
Seoul Museum of Art_ Pungnaptoseong
Welcome to Open-Air Museum_Pungnap.
Here is Pungnaptoseong, an earthen mound built by the people of the Hanseong Baekje period to defend their city along the windy Han River. Over time, a city has been built within the fortress, burying traces of past eras underground. With relics buried one to two meters below the surface, the inside of the fortress itself becomes a vast, hidden museum.
Now, please take a moment to imagine this immense museum, and remember that a museum has exhibition halls where relics or artworks are displayed. This exhibition envisions the excavation sites within the fortress as exhibition halls. That said, these halls come to be sites where visitors encounter contemporary artworks while walking along the streets or turning a corner, thus blending the past with the present.
So, what kind of works would you expect to encounter in such a museum? This exhibition consists of “reappearing” works that can metaphorically represent the characteristics of space and time. You will encounter the emergence of traditional media experiments, historical works, images, and others. In today’s time of immense interest in nonlinear temporality, the exhibition showcases works by artists who have meticulously experimented with and restructured the content, form, and structure of traditional media in the Korean art scene; these works metaphorically and materially represent the layers of time and space in contemporary Pungnap-dong. Additionally, it explores the spatial boundaries of art and museums by installing mediums such as Korean painting, painting, video, photography, and ceramics, which are usually exhibited indoors, outdoors.
These works by the mound are realized like small openings to a portal to another time and space, with even the flow of the wind between them becoming visible. Artist Seung-taek Lee, who has established a unique artistic practice through the concept of “non-art,” presents another track in this exhibition by circulating through the city. Lee’s bicycle carrying the earth symbolizes the reappearance of historical works and becomes a ritual of circulation. To add, Lee’s wind extends beyond the city to the fortress; the red cloth flying across the wind, along with the earth running through the fortress, reaches back to a time older than the Hanseong Baekje period, older than ancient times, making one perceive the planet Earth and its life.
How did you feel after walking through this vast museum and discovering the hidden artworks? We hope this exhibition provides an opportunity for you to transform your view of Pungnaptoseong, a historical yet everyday space, and discover new possibilities within the city. (C) Seoul Museum of Art
Since 2019, Sungyoon Jung has been exhibiting installations featuring architecturally arranged stacks of PVC balls. The tension created by the immense scale and materiality of the works interacts with and delineates the spaces in which they are situated in various ways. The artist introduces flexibility and movement to rigid machinery, creating moments when the edges of objects become blurred and, at times, orchestrates transitions that overwhelm the sites where the sculptures come into contact.
This exhibition presents Jung’s Heavy Dots, a four-meter-tall stainless steel structure in which balls of variable sizes and elasticities press against each other, compressing and protruding. The artist explores the boundaries of sculpture within art by stacking up structures made of industrial materials, such as stainless steel and PVC. With that, an enormous mass stacked up layer by layer seems to appear out of nowhere, disrupting and offering a new perception of the site known as Pungnap-dong.
Jung employs the piled-up grid structure as a metaphor for the continuum of time, spanning from the past to the present; the black spheres embedded within the structure subtly allude to the humans who have driven historical progress. (C) Seoul Museum of Art
