Artful Seoul: Sites in the City and Around

It’s hard to believe that autumn is long gone and Christmas is upon us! In this season when we especially are missing family and friends back home, it is a comfort to realize that in a few short months, we have made friends in Seoul who are fellow explorers. We feel really grateful for the opportunity to meet and learn from this international community. As a bonus, it’s always great to have a network of people who know about places we otherwise would never have thought to visit!

While Peter is at the lab during the week, I’ve had the privilege of sight-seeing with new friends. As it happens, for several weeks in a row we visited art exhibits and outdoor art parks in Seoul and surrounding areas. As we enter a new season, here is a grateful reflection on a couple of our artful autumn adventures.

Museum SAN

Museum SAN (Space, Art, Nature) is on the grounds of Oak Valley Ski and Golf Resort in Gangwon Province. Three friends rented a car and headed out to the resort for the day, mostly to check out the James Turrell exhibit for which the museum is known.

Before we ever got to the exhibit, however, we were blown away by the beauty of the museum, its grounds, and its views. Designed by Tadao Ando and opened in 2013, the museum is meant to reflect the connection among sky, earth, and humans. This is a very traditional concept found in ancient Korean art. It is said that even the Korean alphabet, hangeul, is based on shapes representing these three entities.

The museum is filled with light that pours in from windows meant to let the outside in as much as possible. The exhibits are sparse but include some contemporary Korean artwork, as well as displays about the history of tradional Korean paper-making.

This museum was the perfect place to view a James Turrell exhibit, as the artist is known within the Light and Space movement. These exhibits felt like optical illusions, as spaces that initially seemed flat would suddenly appear as whole rooms when the light changed. We were not allowed to take photos during our tour of the exhibit, which was guided entirely in Korean. We were given some minimal English information. The only time this posed a problem for we three non-Korean-speaking women was when we were led into a dark room with only these instructions in red:

I can’t emphasize enough that we were walking forward in complete darkness with no ability to understand the guide, with only this paper in our hands. We were genuinely worried we would accidentally fall off a cliff! There was a small moment of panic involved. Well, as it turns out, the “cliff” was not associated with this particular artwork but was in fact in another room entirely (aptly – the “Horizon Room”).

We were rather relieved to be seated on a bench in the dark room rather than being taken to the edge of a cliff. Luckily, despite the warning being in the wrong spot we also did not fall off the cliff in the Horizon Room. Instead, at the bottom of a steep staircase we were treated to this view.

Happily, we had signed up for a 30-minute meditation session after the exhibit, so we were able to re-regulate our blood pressure. It was very soothing to lie on the heated floor of the meditation room and watch the light, even if we still could not understand most of the language.

Verdict: Museum SAN was worth the drive to Gangwon-do, especially with autumn scenery viewing as an added benefit.

team Lab: LIFE

Without friends in the know, I definitely would have missed this exhibit at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul. DDP was designed by British Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid and opened in 2014. I just learned that this building replaced the old Dongdaemun Stadium, built during the Japanese Colonial Period in 1925 to celebrate the birthday of a Japanese prince. The stadium was demolished in 2007.

Located in Seoul’s fashion district, DDP is now a space for arts, culture, shopping, and all kinds of events. It’s such a cool building, I don’t even need much of an excuse to visit this area, so I’m thrilled to have seen an exhibit inside.

In another light/darkness theme, team Lab: LIFE takes viewers through the life cycle of flowers with a regenerating computer program. (Click on that link and take a look – you can really get a sense of what the exhibit is like.) It took us much of the way through the installation to realize that the artwork was actually responding to the movement of the people viewing it at any given time. Really impressive.

Each room leads seamlessly into the next: from light, to water, to plant (and some animal) life.

We spent the most time in the room pictured below, watching twelve different varieties of flowers grow, bloom, and disappear.

In the final room of the exhibit, water would flow and flowers bloom in response to viewers touching the walls and walking across the floor. The experience was so soothing, we didn’t want to leave!

I’ve been so impressed with the many interactive exhibits we’ve enjoyed in Seoul’s museums. Stay tuned for more Artful Seoul to come!