Part of the Seoul Museum of Art's 'Emerging Artists Exhibition Support Program'
An exhibition of memories of Bamseom, the island that vanished amid Seoul's urban development
The Seoul Museum of Art (Director Baik Ji-sook) is presenting Shin Mi-jung's <City×Island×Archive>, selected for the 2020 'Emerging Artists Exhibition Support Program,' at the SeMA Bunker of the Seoul Museum of Art through April 4. The Seoul Museum of Art has been sequentially unveiling, since February 2021, five exhibitions that were selected for the 2020 Emerging Artists Exhibition Support Program but could not open due to closures caused by COVID-19.
The Emerging Artists Exhibition Support Program is a program through which the Seoul Museum of Art has, since 2008, supported capable emerging artists and curators in their artistic activities by covering various costs related to holding exhibitions and providing consulting matches, among other assistance.
Shin Mi-jung's <City×Island×Archive>, presented on this occasion, is an exhibition that composes memories of places that disappeared due to Seoul's urban development in the 20th century through video and archival installations.
Over the past two years or so, artist Shin Mi-jung has communicated with the former residents of Bamseom and traced the trajectory of memories about the island that vanished during Seoul's 20th-century urban development, and she has constructed the exhibition based on the materials collected in this process.
The video work on display, <Yuldo (栗島)>, takes the old name of 'Bamseom' as its title, reawakening the sense of place of the forgotten Bamseom through the traces and memories of the life of Lee Il-yong (1936), a person displaced from Bamseom. By presenting the private materials of the Bamseom residents who lost their hometown as historical records within the public space of an exhibition hall, it reproduces individual memories as aesthetic images.
The SeMA Bunker is a repurposing, as an exhibition space, of the former Yeouido secret underground bunker presumed to have been built during the military regime of the 1970s, and it has been operated as a branch of the Seoul Museum of Art since 2017. In this facility, which symbolizes the ordeals of Korea's modern and contemporary history, artist Shin Mi-jung restores, as landscape imagery, the memory of Bamseom—the island blown up and erased for the development of Yeouido. Through this exhibition, it is hoped that the SeMA Bunker will become, beyond a platform for presenting works, a place of coexistence where a community's memories and the images that contain them meet.
Shin Mi-jung has told the stories of people who lost their place to enormous external forces such as forced relocation, expulsion, or displacement, and of the physical or mental spaces that they have still not recovered. In particular, she has taken an interest in individual lives that were forgotten or forcibly erased within Korea's modern history of liberation and war.
Meanwhile, the Seoul Museum of Art plans to provide an online exhibition-tour video of <City×Island×Archive> through the Seoul Museum of Art's official social media channels. The SeMA Bunker can be visited in person without advance reservation, and to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the number of simultaneous visitors is limited to no more than 30. Detailed information about the exhibition can be found on the Seoul Museum of Art's website (sema.seoul.go.kr).