The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) announced a brief exhibition schedule prior to its official press release, which will come out in January. Among the museum’s various exhibitions, three will mainly feature contemporary artworks by Korean or international artists. 
The Young Korean Artists 2023, an exhibition program held every other year, is scheduled to be held at MMCA’s Gwacheon branch from April through August.

The exhibition program, which is in its 21st edition this year, has been running for 40 years. Its first event began in 1981, and in 1989, it changed its Korean title, which is still used today. The Young Korean Artists program aims to provide the opportunity to look into the trend in contemporary art by featuring the experimental artistic practices of young artists, to see the next generation of artists, and to create a dialogue between the artists and the viewers.

In the past, the Young Korean Artists program has contributed to fostering art movements led by young artist groups and collectives active in the 1990s, such as Metavox and Nanjido, and artists experimenting with Korean painting techniques and subjects.

From November 2023 to May 2024, the MMCA’s Gwacheon main branch will hold its first exhibition highlighting geometric abstraction. Geometric abstraction formed the mainstream of the Korean art scene in the late 1960s to the 1970s through artists such as Yoo Youngkuk, Lee Seung Jio, and Han Mook. The exhibition features works not only by these artists but also by contemporary artists such as Hong Seung-hye and Suki Seokyeong Kang, who inherited and interpreted the Korean geometric abstraction movement in various ways.

The Game Society (working title) exhibition, scheduled to be held from May to September, encompasses works by not only Korean artists but also other artists from various nationalities who reflect the recent virtual reality boom accelerated by technological development and the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition highlights realism in computer games and community-based experiences through the works by Harun Farocki, Cory Arcangel, Kim Heecheon, and Ram Han, as well as the Museum of Modern Art’s games collection.

The museum will also be highlighting Korean avant-garde art, which has been largely unexplored compared to other Korean modern and contemporary art movements in its history. The Avant-Garde: Experimental Art in South Korea, in the 1960s–1970s, is co-organized with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The exhibition will be first held at the MMCA in May and will travel to the Guggenheim in September, remaining there through January 2024. Kang Soojung, Senior Curator at the MMCA, and Kyung An, Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim. In August, the MMCA Seoul will be highlighting the works of Kim Kulim (b. 1936), one of the leading figures of the Korean Avant-Garde movement.

The MMCA Hyundai Motors series, an annual exhibition project of esteemed Korean artists, will also be exhibited from September 2023 to February 2024, with artists announced at a later date.

References

• 국립현대미술관(the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, MMCA)