Exhibition view: Group Exhibition, The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain, Seoul Museum of Art (7 December 2023–3 March 2024). Courtesy Seoul Museum of Art. Photo: Cocoa Pictures.
As art museums increasingly emphasise relationships and mutuality, curators have placed a greater focus on fostering dynamic connections between the viewer and the artwork.
In the pursuit of this ongoing quest, a collaboration has emerged among the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, and Singapore Art Museum (SAM), which reconsiders the practice of sharing between institutions, curators, and artworks, and between the spectator and the art object.
Curators Gahee Park (SeMA), Reuben Keehan (QAGOMA), and Ong Puay Khim (SAM) have written collectively about the process in the form of letters and conversations. One letter expresses Khim's initial concern over 'what value [the project] may bring without being production-oriented.' As she continues to write, however, this is where the act of sharing is most generative, opening up room for reflections on how existing works have been approached and finding new ways of showing them.
Among the challenges of this partnership were the norms of the institution: partnerships between art museums often revolve around collection loans or travelling exhibits, curated by a lead organisation with contributions from participants. To ensure a non-hierarchical and consistent sharing of their collections, the three partners will each host a different programme over the next three years.
The first of the project is The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes a Mountain at SeMA (7 December 2023–3 March 2024), comprising works by 31 artists and teams. The title, proposed by artist Heman Chong and his newly commissioned work by SeMA, also evokes the Korean proverb 'gathering dust to make a mountain', which lauds small efforts and tenacity. If each artwork is a speck of dust, slowly growing into a mountain, then the curator may be seen as its guide.
The exhibition employs six action-words in a bid to envision the preeminent gestures that must precede sharing: love-ing, translate-ing, abstract-ing and silence-ing, statue-ing, island-ing, and webbed-ing. Two or more action-words accompany each work in its label, appealing to the viewer as a self-referential barometer for navigating the exhibition.
Lee Ufan's Relatum – Dialogue (2009), a permanent outdoor installation made up of two rocks separated by iron plates, is an instance of love-ing, which describes the act of love as 'facing someone beyond one's comfort zone.' To love means to collapse boundaries, welcoming others into our territories and for us to enter theirs. Through love abounds new relationships, whether between the rocks and the metal plates, the work and its architectural surroundings, or the viewer and the work.
Once inside, mountainous stairs characteristic of the museum lead to the first exhibition room on the third floor. In one corner is Echolalia (2009/2023), a collaborative installation by artist Gary-Ross Pastrana and writer Zoe Dulay. Pastrana crafted replicas of ordinary items from materials like sawdust, adhesive resin, and soap, and Dulay wrote short stories about them in an act of translate-ing.
Artist Lim Jeong Soo added a third layer to the collaboration, writing a novel based on Pastranas' objects. On 8 December, she translated her text into a performance, appearing before a backdrop depicting crocodiles that looked like mountains.
On the opposite wall from Echolalia is D Harding's We breathe together (2017–ongoing), a row of 12 glass panels coated in pigment. Each colour references the land from which the artist extracted the pigment, including the territories of Bidjara, Ghungalu, and Garingbal, in a translate-ing of land, Indigenous history, and traditions into a visual language.
Tang Da Wu's Monument for Seub Nakhasathien (1991) in the next room stands out as a thought-provoking example of statue-ing, an action-word for 'the movements to build collective experiences and senses.' This unassuming wooden work shows a fragile boat sailing upstream in a tribute to the eponymous Thai conservationist. Without pedestals or platforms, the installation is a captivating presence on the bare floor.
Island-ing connects movements as exemplified by Hong Misun's 'Code' (1994), a series of black-and-white photographs scattered throughout the exhibition rooms. Through poetic images of floating hands, playing a game of cat's cradle, Hong alludes to the interconnectedness of community.
The research project Convening the Untitleds is a curatorial exercise in deliberate opacity, in which Eunha Chang (Exhibition Coordinator, SeMA), Teng Yen Hui (Assistant Curator, SAM), and Ruha Fifita (Curatorial Assistant, QAGOMA) interpreted untitled works from the museums' collections without consulting background information. Mediated by their knowledge and experiences, the project raises questions about the politics of titles and the curator's authority over reading and presenting a work of art to the audience.
After a while, following the mountain of action-words can feel overwhelming. But this is an exhibition where contemplation is as much an action as physical movement—viewers may discover their own action-words and contribute them to the boxes in the rooms, joining the accumulating dust that becomes a mountain. —[O]
