Seoul Museum of Art
The Seoul Museum of Art is a network museum that users, mediators, and producers are building together.
Seoul’s network museum, unique to Seoul, that is jointly created by users, mediators, and producers. The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) aims to build public memories shared by all users, mediators, and producers and imagine a renewed future by cultivating socio-cultural values. SeMA (referred to as Seoul’s Network Museum) adapts to changes in the times and art trends and grows each day through SeMA’s branch museums situated all over Seoul that reach across and complement one another, inspiring citizens of Korea and beyond.
June 2024
Can you provide a brief description of the mission and vision of the Seoul Museum of Art?
The Seoul Museum of Art(SeMA) that opened in 1988 is a ‘Seoul’s Network Museum’ in which three branches and three facilities throughout Seoul including the main building located in the center of Seoul, intersect in response to changes in the times and art, and where users, producers, and mediators come together. In particular, SeMA plans to additionally open the Photographic Arts Center, Seoul Museum of Art that will be the first public photography museum in Korea, and the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art that will specialize in new media and integrated art in 2024~2025. In addition to external expansion, programs and contents based on multifaceted research will be planned to connect the cultural city of Seoul with the world and establishing ourselves as a leading public art museum that symbolizes Seoul.
What makes your museum's collection unique, and how does it contribute to the cultural landscape?
SeMA began collecting artworks in 1985 with the goal of forming a collection that looks at the flow of Korean art since the 1950s, and currently holds a collection of about 6,000 works. In particular, since the 2000s, works by major Korean artists are being collected as part of the museum’s main strategy of specializing in contemporary art, with the majority of the overall collection consisting of works created after the 2000s. In addition, it also holds specialized collections of high art-historical value through large-scale acquisition, such as the Chun Kyung-ja Collection, Kwon Jin Kyu Collection, and Choi Min Collection. SeMA is continuing to make collections that both reflect the museum's identity and actively embrace the trend of contemporary art, such as collecting in conjunction with special exhibitions based on research of its own collection, collecting in conjunction with the Seoul Mediacity Biennale that it has been hosting since 2000, and public offerings that is open to both artists and collectors. The collection of SeMA, which focuses on contemporary collection based on the museum's identity, is expected to serve as a record of the flow of Korean modern art, as well as an important material for examining its contemporary meaning.
How does your museum participate in educational initiatives, and what programs does it offer to enhance the public's understanding of art?
SeMA establishes themes of contemporary topics and art historical values as each year’s “SeMA Agenda”, and reflects them not only in exhibitions but also in the museum’s overall program including education. In particular, educational programs are designed not only for visitors that frequent the museum, but to also discover and study potential visitors and invite them to the museum. In addition, by making the most of the characteristics of an art museum that come in touch with a diverse and heterogeneous crowd, the program is subdivided into exhibition-related programs, school programs, artist programs, and community engagement programs. Recently, in order to improve cultural accessibility, we are further developing and expanding institutional education programs that embrace the disabled, the elderly, and culturally underprivileged groups.
Could you share information about any ongoing research initiatives or collaborations that your museum is currently involved in?
SeMA launched an online research platform SeMA Coral in 2021. The name “Coral,” which is evocative of the underwater animal, is a combination of the prefix co- and the word relational, and refers to the ideas of connection and relationships. SeMA Coral regularly publishes articles that focus on the Institutional and Exhibition Agenda of the year and collates studies that have been produced in the course of the exhibitions and programs that were conducted at the museum. This research platform connects the fragments of the knowledge produced in the museum and expands its area of research with commissioned papers to create knowledge communities.
Collaboration with other institutions also play a significant role as research initiatives. The recent project with Singapore Art Museum, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art was a good example. Centered around collections of shared resources, the three institutions envision different sets of relationships and their outcomes as a common knowledge via co-researching, co-programming, co-commissioning, and co-publishing. As part of the curatorial impetus for the institutions to address and exchange thoughts and experiences on the idea of ‘sharing’, SeMA’s 2023 Institutional Agenda sets a glossary of agendas with selected works from each collection, and it ultimately evolves into forms of exhibition, public program, publication etc. This collaboration is itself a research initiative in the institutional practice of sharing.
How does your institution prioritize sustainability in its operations and practices?
Prior to introducing sustainability into the museum's policy in earnest beginning in 2025, SeMA is using 2024 as a preparatory year to hold book talks, dialogue meetings, workshops, and online publications under the name of ‘SeMA Ecology’ with experts and the public who have a common awareness of the problem. This is to avoid creating unrealistic or uniform manuals, instead finding an appropriate methodology by establishing a public forum that listen to various voices.
What should be importantly considered in a museum's sustainable policy is to abstain from borrowing and using up future possibilities to merely satisfy present needs. Here, future possibilities encompass not only the Earth's ecosystem but also all issues including the museum's manpower, budget, and employment. based on this year's discussions, SeMA, which is already carrying out small practices such as leaflet recycling, plans to operate with a focus on sustainability from art programs to administration beginning next year, to which end the institutional agenda and exhibition agenda have respectively been set to ‘Action’ and ‘Planet’.
In what ways does your museum actively engage with and contribute to the local community through its programs?
SeMA’s locality is multifaceted with its branch museums spread across the mega city of Seoul. In that every museum is local in a way, each of them makes an effort to draw up exhibitions and public programs, to engage with specific local communities and at the same time to generate a more general relevance and resonance. The Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, one of SeMA’s branches located in the northeastern part of Seoul, for example, devises various ways of making the latest practices and discourses of contemporary art more accessible and more intelligible to local communities nearby. Regarding the high ratio of school-age population in the area, when Buk-SeMA commissions internationally renowned artists such as Do Ho Suh and Leandro Erlich to produce new works for the museum, they are asked to give consideration the children and student audiences. Also, as Buk-SeMA has a dozen art colleges around it, different forms of collaborations have been developed with universities that contribute to their curricula. Locality is not a given thing, though, and SeMA takes it as one of its crucial tasks to revisit and redefine the very notion of locality through its curations and programs.