Kang Eun Yup, Koo Soohyun, Kim Beom, Gimhongsok, Kim Shin Rok & Gimhongsok, Kiri Dalena, Fyerool Darma, Rice Brewing Sisters Club (RBSC, Son Hyemin, Ryu Soyoon), Michael Lee, Convening the Untitleds (Eunha Chang, Teng Yen Hui, Ruha Fifita), Lee Wen, Lim Tzay Chuen, Angelica Mesiti, Bonita Ely, Lee Ufan, Mire Lee, Yee I-Lann, Heman Chong, Heman Chong and Renee Staal, Tang Da Wu, Gary-Ross Pastrana & Zoe Dulay & Lim Jeong Soo, Part-time Suite, Brian Fuata, Emily Floyd, D Harding, Ham Yang Ah, Amanda Heng, Hong Myung-Seop, Hong Misun, Hong Lee, Hyun-Sook, Sasa[44]

히만 청, 〈우리가 모여 산을 이루는 이야기(The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain〉, 2023. 서울시립미술관 커미션, 디자인: 신신(신해옥, 신동혁). 서울시립미술관 제공.

The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain is an exhibition that considers the role of contemporary art museums within the context of ‘sharing’, the 2023 institutional agenda of Seoul Museum of Art. Traditionally, art museums have functioned as spaces for collecting, researching and exhibiting artworks. Today, however, museums are transforming into social spaces that build shared experience and collective values through engagement with diverse clusters of people. The ideas towards the relationship such as ‘mutuality’ and ‘interconnectedness’ become important values for museum activities. Sharing, which involves distributing what one owns, necessitates the presence of others. It is in this sense that sharing becomes a value that helps us reconsider the practice of contemporary art museums that place ‘relationships’ at its core. What, then, do we share in the museum, and with whom?

이우환, 〈항(項)-대화〉, 2009, 철판, 자연석, 200×400×1.5cm(×2개), 50×87×60cm, 50×77×60cm. 서울시립미술관 소장, 2012-77. 이미지 제공: 서울시립미술관.

The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain brings collections―the museum’s representative public resources― to the centre of sharing. It is a place for us to encounter and speak with each other, holding as its starting point the collections of three institutions: Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). Sharing, as practised by the art museum, is a journey to find common ground amidst misunderstandings, differences and surprises within unexpected encounters, thereby reconfiguring our own respective bounds of knowledge along the way. As such, the artworks in this exhibition go beyond objects of appreciation and instead become tools and catalysts that connect and intertwine our varying ways of life, creating a new practice of sharing.

아만다 헹, 〈대화를 합시다〉, 1996-, 현장 퍼포먼스와 설치, 가변설치. 내셔널 갤러리 싱가포르 소장, 2020-00353. 싱가포르국립대학교에서 2017년에 진행된 퍼포먼스 이미지. 이미지 제공: 싱가포르국립대학교 미술관.

This exhibition utilises action-words to imagine the movements that must take precedence when we attempt to practise sharing in the art museum, and more broadly, within life. The work of facing someone beyond my comfort zone (love-ing), the will to understand the language of an other (translate-ing), the process of discovering and forming a relationship with meanings beyond language (abstract-ing and silence-ing), the movements to build collective experiences and senses (statue-ing), the practice of connecting such movements in various directions (island-ing) and the attempt to thereby create new shapes (webbed-ing)―all of these unfold within a network of specific situations, movements and artworks. You may follow this chain of practice among the artworks or re-examine the meaning of sharing as you reconstruct your own relational network. Through these artworks, we encounter novel situations and share conversations, deliberating on and devising movements of common practice.

키리 달레나, 〈지워진 슬로건〉, 2014, 포토래그 바리타 면섬유의 광택 종이에 잉크젯 프린트, 91.4×141.3cm. 이미지 제공: 작가.

Only when we meet, we can truly learn how to share with one another and what we can produce together. The Part In the Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain proposes various situations and gatherings, through which the hope is to build the meaning of ‘sharing’ together with you. This exhibition, therefore, takes time and relies on your continued participation. Slowly following the forms of practises each driven by the artworks, you can reflect on what can be shared and collaboratively produced within the art museum, and to contemplate the significance of this exhibition itself, which embodies the very essence of sharing.

홍미선, 〈Code 11〉, 1994 (2020 프린트), 디지털 아카이벌 피그먼트 프린트, 39.3×53.2cm. 서울시립미술관 소장, 2020-104. 서울시립미술관 제공.

Seoul Museum of Art

61, Deoksugung-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul

Seoul Museum of Art, Seosomun Main Branch

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