Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea will open the year with hyper-realist sculptor Ron Mueck's first museum show in Asia in collaboration with Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris

Kim Sung-hee, director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, speaks at the press conference on Tuesday at the MMCA Seoul. (Yonhap)
Kim Sung-hee, director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, speaks at the press conference on Tuesday at the MMCA Seoul. (Yonhap)

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea will collaborate with foreign institutions on the largest scale ever this year, co-hosting exhibitions with more than six foreign institutions in Asia, Europe and the US.

“We are getting many calls from overseas institutions for outbound exhibitions,” Kim Sung-hee, director of the museum, told reporters in Seoul Tuesday while presenting the museum's plan for the year. "The first exhibition to open this year is 'Ron Mueck,' organized in collaboration with the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris. This marks the artist’s first museum exhibition in Asia,” she said.

The state museum will collaborate or exchange exhibitions with five countries this year -- Japan, Singapore, Italy, China and the US – which is unprecedented for MMCA.

In May, “Tomorrow We’ll Be” will open at the MMCA Children's Museum of Art, co-hosted with the National Gallery Singapore.

Pioneering landscape architect Jung Young-sun’s first state museum exhibition “Jung Youngsun: For All That Breaths On Earth,” which ran from April to September last year, will travel to Venice, Italy, from May to July, coinciding with the Venice Biennale’s of Architecture. Jung’s works will be shown at Procuratie Vecchie, located at the San Marco Square.

Co-curated with the National Art Museum of China, the exhibition “The Modern and Contemporary Ink Art of the Republic of Korea and the People’s Republic of China,” which was shown in Korea last year, will feature works by 145 Korean Chinese ink artists at the Chinese state museum from June to August.

At the end of the year, the exhibition “Korea and Japan Contemporary Art” will be held at the Yokohama Museum of Art in December. The exhibition marking the 60th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries will present works by some 50 contemporary artists from South Korea and Japan.

MMCA will also be part of the US and UK traveling exhibition “Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared,” featuring works donated by the late Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee to the MMCA and the National Museum of Korea. The exhibition will start in November at the National Museum of Asian Art, part of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.

Aside from exhibitions, the museum will launch the MMCA Research Fellowship this year to encourage interaction and discourse between Korean and foreign scholars. Alexander Alberro, art historian and professor at Columbia University in New York, will be in Seoul this year as the first research fellow, according to the museum.

Meanwhile, the museum saw a record number of visitors from abroad, reaching 220,000, a 36 percent rise from 2019.