Watch and Chill

Watch and Chill: Streaming Art to Your Homes seeks to explore ways to bring international art institutions, artists, and audiences together around a carefully curated selection of moving image artworks. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) collaborated with Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) in Manila, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, and the M+, West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong in launching the subscription-based art streaming platform Watch and Chill. Responding to and examining the changing behavioral patterns of the digital era, the exhibition shares video works by major artists active in Asia through its online platform. The contents of the platform are accessible exclusively to subscribers, who will receive emails alerting them to newly uploaded works every Friday while the platform is in operation.

Presentation of this platform is not limited to the virtual space but also as physically embodied as an exhibition. Staging the “home” as a primary site for consuming the Watch and Chill platform, the exhibition takes the form of a model house for its unique experience. With a space designed around four sub-themes—“Things in My Living Room,” “By the Other Being,” “Community of Houses,” “Meta-Home”—both the platform and the exhibition consider the multilayered connections of homes that have transformed into media environments.

“Things in My Living Room” shows how the artists broaden their sense to encompass relationships between objects and people and between objects and society by looking beyond the relationships among items from home. “By the Other Being” reflects on the physical and mental aspects of the home as a safe haven, being influenced by the interventions and intrusions of other beings. “Community of Houses” proposes alternative forms of living together that differ from the traditional community of neighbors. “Meta-Home” focuses on “homes beyond homes,” i.e., the hyper-connectivity of our domestic spaces. It reveals varied forms of metaphysical imagination, including homes connected with the virtual world as well as mental and spiritual connections that transcend technological ones. 

“The city has moved into the bed.” Linked via an unprecedented amount of data transmissions, our homes have gone beyond the mere private function of “dwelling” and have long entered into the public realm. The pandemic has only exposed this reality even more. Activating a media landscape that takes place in both home-as-museum and museum-as-home, the Watch and Chill platform will serve as a test bed for the museum to experiment with the fluid possibilities of responding to our changing habits of media consumption.

The exhibition will travel to the MCAD in October, the MAIIAM in December and the M+ in January 2022. Watch and Chill streaming service will continue through February of next year.

Curated by Jihoi Lee, Joselina Cruz, Kittima Chareeprasit, and Silke Schmickl.