“Face to Face to Face Project: Center Shift” Poster ©Total Museum of Contemporary ArtThe Total Museum of Contemporary Art will present “Face to Face to Face Project: Center Shift,” the 2023 Ulsan Art Museum Emerging Artist Performance Exhibition, from May 25 to July 2.
In the Korean art world, art history narratives and exhibitions centered on Seoul or the capital region have limited and stifled the activities of regional artists. In response, public art museums have implemented many programs to foster emerging regional artists and provide them with equal opportunities, but they are often one-offs or abandoned midway through.
Amidst this reality, this exhibition is a highly unusual and pioneering attempt by the Ulsan Museum of Art to shift the center of art into a regional art museum as part of a project designed to resolve the imbalance in cultural discourse between the center and the provinces and to revitalize the local art ecosystem.
The ‘Fact to Face to Face Project’ is a project to foster local emerging artists and is a continuous program that consists of four stages: a competition to select promising artists, a purchase of works, and an exhibition at the museum. Starting with a competition for 1:1 portfolio reviews by artists and critics, the project supports local emerging artists in a continuous and multifaceted manner, until the exhibition outside the museum at the Total Art Museum.
The Ulsan Museum of Art was looking for a suitable space for the exhibition and found that the Total Museum of Art in Seoul was holding a special exhibition to introduce artists from other regions, so it was chosen as the exhibition space because it was in line with the intention of the “Face to Face to Face Project: Center Shift”.
The exhibition will introduce most of the works exhibited at “Face to Face to Face 2021,” which was held at Daewangam Park in Ulsan in January 2022, and will feature a variety of works by the 24 artists selected in the competition, including paintings, sculptures, and installations.
