Your Seoul Exhibition Guide

Imagine stepping into the hard drive of a video-based artist who has been working for over 30 years. Now throw in some Tron aesthetics and you have yourself the immersive experience that makes up Hito Steyerl’s exhibition at MMCA. Featuring 23 of her works, the show takes you through her journey understanding our increasingly digital world. At first, this is the kind of show that may leave you a bit puzzled. But give it a chance and you’ll start to see the relevance of her art. Politics, technology, and social media all emerge as themes while she takes a critical look at how images are produced and shared today. Speaking of sharing, give us a shout on Instagram with your pictures from the show! 

Exhibition Site

With metaverse the hottest dinner table topic these days, Ian Cheng’s exhibition will prepare you with more talking points. Five of his animated works are on view. A mix of endearing creatures and cute sounds fill up the futuristic worlds of Cheng’s imagination. While artificial intelligence and game engines aren’t common sights in an art museum, their use in his work remind you that we’re already living in a virtual world. Cheng describes one piece as “a video game that plays itself.” Other pieces follow the story of BOB, an artificial lifeform that dances and morphs on screen. Although not quite a retrospective, this show is an immersive crash course on all things Ian Cheng.

Exhibition Site

We love paintings that feel alive. You might not expect it with Loie Hollowell’s most minimal paintings to date, but their colors pulsate as if they’re breathing. These are from the newest Brain series in her on-going exploration of the body. Ovals that glow in deep reds and sun-like oranges create a meditative experience, almost like you’re looking at a real-time picture of your mind in a trance. Her soft pastel works on the lower floor are always our favorite though. Same imagery on a much smaller scale. But you get a taste of her artistic process: pencil marks scrawled into the margins, notes on what to adjust for when she turns these studies into the featured paintings.

Exhibition Site

With the Venice Biennale freshly opened, we’re thinking back to 2019, when Laure Provost took over the French Pavilion. She’s now got her immersive exhibition style on full view in Dosan Park, this time in the form of a fictional travel agency. As Korea becomes more friendly to international travel post-Covid, Deep Travel Ink will inspire where you should head to next. In this installation, you follow the story of a family and their mysterious destination. You’re left to your own imagination how their trip comes together. The space is set up like any other office space: wall clocks, world maps, and potted plants. But then posters with humorous text like “go to places that don’t exist” start to make you wonder whether there’s really any trip being planned at all.

Exhibition Site

Straight up, the sculptures by Jungyoon Hyen are kind of weird. The fleshy, resin-covered works bulge out like a body-builder who has muscles you never knew existed. In that sense, they are captivating and certainly elicit a response (good or bad). The show highlight for us, however, is the purple painting by Mark Yang. Like men that have taken the place of sardines in a tin can, the bodies take after Yang’s characteristic, simplified human forms. He’s broken it down to basics, with line, shadow, and color. One of our friends interpreted Hyen’s sculptures as something a bit more x-rated (imagine bodies covered in… white goop). That might be a clue to what’s happening in Yang’s works – some wrestling in one, finishing with a state of calm in that hypnotic purple.

Exhibition Site

If you’ve ever wondered how to “see” music or “see” sounds, Oliver Beer’s latest paintings might just do the trick. Debuting for the first time, his Resonance Paintings use sound as his paintbrush. He holds a speaker underneath the canvas, booming to create geometric patterns in blue pigment loosely dusted on the surface. The show itself is in a pristine white space that also features Beer’s Resonance Vessels. Walk up to one of these blue-and-white ceramic vessels, and you’ll start to be immersed in the natural harmony of its form (they’ve placed microphones inside the vessels to amplify the sound). The experience leaves you with a heightened sense of hearing, even in the most everyday of moments. 

Exhibition Site