<Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb>

On view at the Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul Museum of Art, through February 27, 2022

An exhibition exploring body knowledge in the context of ‘learning’

The Seoul Museum of Art (Director Baik Jisook) presents <Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb>, an exhibition examining the meaning of the making experience in handling matter and technology within the digital environment that has expanded rapidly amid the pandemic. The exhibition runs through February 27, 2022 at the Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul Museum of Art.

This exhibition recognizes the side effects of the digital, perceives the digital as a new environment, and addresses the making experience as a way to restore human senses within it. The exhibition title ‘Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ references the title of a research paper by art theorist Choi Jongchul, who, in order to address the ambivalent aspects of the digital amid the surge in digital overload following COVID-19, took a fresh look at Rosalind Krauss’s concept of the post-medium. This exhibition invites four participating artists who create their works while seeking a reciprocal relationship with matter and technology, in order to explore ways in which human senses can remain valid within today’s changing technological environment.

To this end, the exhibition has invited four participating artists who create their works while seeking a reciprocal relationship with matter and technology. In working with media such as sculpture, painting, installation, and performance, they first run simulations against a digital backdrop—using tools such as SketchUp and 3D scanning—before beginning production, and then bring their works into reality using multiple senses. The museum asked these artists to set up the exhibition space as an environment where the virtual and the real overlap, and within it to address making as a process of contact with objects using bodily senses and technology.

Through the works of Jung Jihyun, who explores materials and attempts sculpture in virtual reality; Jung Heemin, who sets up the virtual mode of ‘meditation’ to express heightened senses as a medium; Park Aram, who evokes memories imprinted on body and mind by smart devices and offers audiences an experience of imaginative drawing; and Jeong Myeongwoo, who uses motion capture to turn bodily movement into data and presents performances that interact with that data, the exhibition seeks to explore ways in which human senses can remain valid within today’s changing technological environment.

Baik Jisook, Director of the Seoul Museum of Art, said, “Through this exhibition, we sought to reflect on what kind of audience experience the Seoul Museum of Art should create going forward, as museum activities inevitably move online in the wake of the pandemic.”

▲ Park Aram, Wheel