MemoryᆞSpace

Participating artists: Bokyung Kim, Diagonal Thoughts, Seung hyun Moon (Yellow Dot Company), Min ha Park, Gyungsu An, Seungbin Yang, Hyangro Yoon, Daniel Schine Lee, Wonhae Hwang

A thematic exhibition by ARKO Art Center, MemoryᆞSpace has contemporary artists applying their eye to the memories surrounding the institution, connecting and engaging its spaces as those memories are summoned back into the Center. With the artwork making use of various spaces within the Center—not just its galleries, Archive Lounge, Project Space, and outdoor lobby, but even its staircases, corridors, and restrooms—the exhibition provides an opportunity to experience ARKO Art Center in a new way as it prepares for its 50th anniversary.

The ARKO Art Center has been a source of support for generations of artists from its location on Daehak-ro Road in Seoul’s Dongsung neighborhood, a center for the democratization movement by students at the Seoul National University College as well as a symbol of youth culture preaching freedom and resistance. The participating artists of MemoryᆞSpace focus on the different layers of memory that have formed around ARKO Art Center as a setting that has witnessed the changes in Korean society through the eras and existed in a crucial relationship of mutual influence with contemporary art. Captured in media such as painting, performance, video, sound, and sculpture, the shadows of yesterday leave living traces of memory on the Center as they blur the boundaries between its internal and external settings and the gap between past and present.

Through this exhibition, fragmented memories inscribed in individuals emerge to a shared surface and then settle into the Center’s environment, presenting its histories and stories, the pathways through its structure, and its physical experiences in new ways. Based on memories that emerge from personal experience, the artworks capture the ways in which the setting’s meaning has changed with time—encouraging us to think of how the artist’s and historian’s roles differ in pondering and documenting a space’s history. As the exhibition freely reconfigures and colorfully weaves fading memories that have been situated in the time and space of the ARKO Art Center today, we look forward to the Center reemerging as an even more vibrant place.