One of the good things about the newly opened Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Sogyeok-dong, Seoul, is its “plain” entrances. I would call them plain because the front and side doors are not much different from those you pass through when you visit any downtown residential administration center or bureaucratic office. There is not even a revolving door. 

At its rear entrance, there is no gate or wall or anything that serves to delimit the MMCA compound from a small back alley of Bukchon. There’s only a plain-clothed guard strolling about who can tell you that you are entering Seoul’s newest public facility, where ingenious artists are boldly challenging the conventional concepts of art.

When I first visited the MMCA Seoul about a month ago, there were no longer any protesters. The director of the MMCA, which now has exhibition facilities in Gwacheon, Deoksu Palace and Sogyeok-dong, had issued a statement of apology, seeking the understanding of those artists who believed they were unjustly excluded from the inaugural exhibition of the state-run art museum. They complained that the artists invited to the inaugural “Zeitgeist” exhibition were predominantly Seoul National University graduates.

Whatever the politics of Korea’s art world, I was glad that we now have a contemporary art museum in central Seoul and have made five visits to it in a little more than a month, including one stop just to use its slick cafeteria. These forays into the new museum, I should confess, were aimed at enhancing my understanding of that particular realm of art and relieving the kind of unease I feel whenever I confront a work of modern art such as Nam June Paik’s pyramid of TV monitors at the Gwacheon MMCA, or Lee Woo-hwan’s assemblage of rocks. The MMCA Seoul helped me a lot.

A 19th century poet characterized the personal nature of art and the impersonal nature of science by saying, “Art is I; science is we.” Making rounds of the huge galleries with a combined space reportedly equivalent to seven soccer fields, I was first of all impressed by the close collaboration between art and science-technology in a number of representative exhibits in this 21st century museum.

They call this the age of convergence, and the exhibited artists worked with architects, designers, new media experts, sound specialists and performing artists, or they themselves explored these diverse areas of creativeness. The inaugural exhibition at the MMCA Seoul offered plenty of works under the abstruse themes of “Connecting-Unfolding” and “Networkism and Complexity.”

The modern art museum even embraced history. The Jongchinbu building of the Joseon Era and an old three-story structure that had served as the Capital Army Hospital since the war have been kept intact (after extensive renovations) in the museum compound, recognized by the authorities for their cultural value. The unpretentious main entrance was that of the former military hospital. The MMCA Seoul is also located on the western side of Bukchon, the most traditionally intact part of the 600-year-old capital city.

In order to minimize the number of alterations, most MMCA galleries were built underground, leaving the original structures for administrative and auxiliary functions and using the multistory superstructure for a main gallery. As a result, the MMCA Seoul does not boast a unique facade or contemporary architecture but looks like an assortment of concrete boxes. Planners must have decided that the contents are more important than the package.

Critics may be arguing about whether the chosen artists and their works appropriately reflect the contemporary art world. The inevitable controversies over artistic credentials and qualities aside, the establishment of this major cultural facility at a cost of 300 billion won ($281 million), and only a 10 minutes’ walk from the Anguk or Gwanghwamun subway stations, is a momentous service to the public. For decades, people complained about the poor accessibility of the MMCA Gwacheon, adjoining the Seoul Grand Park Zoo south of the city.

In Galleries 1 and 2, visitors contemplate how the paintings and sculptures by familiar and unfamiliar artists fit into the exhibition’s theme of “zeitgeist.” Curators tried to illustrate the spirit of the times with works by Park Saeng-gwang (“Jeon Bong-jun the Revolutionary”), Suh Se-ok, Song Soo-nam, Rhee Seund-ja and many others. A guide advised viewers to feel “resistance and peace” from the artworks on the walls and the floor.

Hwang In-gi recreated a part of An Gyeon’s “Mongyudowondo” with tens of thousands of yellow and black Lego pieces. There were large lizards made of unknown materials, one on the floor and two in the corridor, and statues of three homeless men wearing fake Nike sneakers and wrapped in blue blankets, standing, sitting and lying in one corner of Gallery 2. Three canvases showing the Viagra drug covered the opposite wall: the first featured a single actual-sized pill, the second showed one magnified by a thousand times and the third had many thousands arranged in a perfect grid. Broken ceramic pieces were rejoined with glue into an artistic object titled “Translated Vase.”

Browsing through spaces on the vast basement floor, this promenader appreciated the artists’ passion for and devotion to the values that they spent so much of their time, energy and material assets attempting to grasp and express. When Choe U-ram’s wood and metal creation hanging from the high ceiling unfolded almost incomprehensibly to depict what he called the “Hidden Shadow of the Moon,” viewers below felt the weight of the young artist’s perseverance. In a passage between galleries, a soprano sang a German lied for a lady she picked from among the visitors and asked to sit in a wooden chair.

Stepping into the “Home within Home within Home within Home within Home” installed by Suh Do-ho inside the “Seoul Box” space sponsored by Hanjin Shipping Co., one is struck by the imaginativeness and ingenuity of the artist in the projection of duplicate images of life-size Korean- and Western-style houses made with blue nylon mesh fabric. Walking out of the Home, I silently dubbed it “the most beautiful mosquito curtain in the world.” A curator’s note said the installation “elucidates and conjures the ever-expanding concept of space.”

When the tour of seven galleries comes to a close at “Epiphyte Chamber,” an interactive installation that reacts to viewers’ movements, your soul could be a little tired after hours of exposure to contemporary avant-garde art. Then you are recommended to cross the street and head straight for the Gyeongbokgung Palace garden, where an entirely different world of placid comfort awaits you.

By Kim Myong-sik 

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. ― Ed.