Busan Museum of Art’s 《Vision and Perspective》 is on view at Today Art Museum in Beijing, China, from August 23 through October 7, 2026.
 
The exhibition marks the first overseas museum presentation of 《Vision and Perspective》, Busan Museum of Art’s long-running program for discovering and supporting artists based in the region, established in 1999. The program has now expanded beyond domestic exhibitions to include international exhibition-making and institutional exchange.
 
The exhibition brings together eight artists who were born in Busan or are currently based in the city: Lee Kyung Kang, Mirae Kim, Jaewon Kim, Taesung Kim, Jihye Park, Hyunsung Park, Jangwoo Yoo, and Hana Yoo. Working across painting, installation, and video, they explore contemporary relationships between image and material, body and environment.

The International Expansion of a Long-Running Artist Development Program
 
Launched in 1999, one year after Busan Museum of Art opened, 《Vision and Perspective》 was established to discover emerging artists working in the region and support their artistic development. By 2025, the program had presented 76 artists across 17 exhibitions, becoming one of the museum’s longest-running artist-support initiatives.
 
Programs and open calls for emerging artists are operated by many institutions, but the sustained commitment of a regional public museum to identifying and supporting successive generations of artists for more than two decades carries particular significance within Korea’s art ecosystem, where major institutions, galleries, critical discourse, and the market remain heavily concentrated in the Seoul metropolitan area.
 
What the program has accumulated over this period extends beyond a record of exhibitions and participating artists. By identifying new practices at different moments and bringing them into the public sphere through museum exhibitions and documentation, 《Vision and Perspective》 has come to function as an institutional archive tracing the changing landscape of contemporary art in Busan and the emergence of new generations of artists.
 
In 2024, the program introduced changes to both its selection process and support structure. The museum replaced its previous internal recommendation system with an open call, selecting eight artists from 158 applicants. Support was also expanded beyond a single exhibition into a longer-term framework encompassing exhibitions in Korea and abroad, critical engagement, and international networking.
 
The eight selected artists presented an exhibition at Sungkok Art Museum in Seoul in 2025, followed by the current exhibition at Today Art Museum in Beijing. In this way, the program has expanded beyond the initial discovery and presentation of artists to connect their subsequent practices with broader art scenes in Korea and internationally.

Busan and Beijing: Different Experiences of “Compressed Modernity”
 
Busan and Beijing share certain historical conditions, having undergone rapid industrialization, urbanization, technological development, and social transformation since the latter half of the twentieth century.
 
At the same time, the two cities have distinct historical experiences and political and social structures. Similar technologies or cultural phenomena have acquired different meanings and generated different memories within each city. The exhibition takes these parallels and differences as a point of departure, considering how artistic practices formed in Busan might be read differently when situated in Beijing, another major East Asian city.
 
Today Art Museum has also emphasized this temporal distinction in its framing of the exhibition: a technology may arrive in two cities at roughly the same time yet occupy entirely different historical moments. An artwork can cross a national border within hours, while the social and historical contexts through which it is interpreted cannot move at the same speed. What appears to be a shared present can therefore contain distinctly different temporalities.
 
These ideas become more tangible through the practices of the participating artists.

Lee Kyung Kang’s Guardian Deity of the Underground (2025) is among the largest works presented in the Beijing exhibition. Working across painting, print-based experimentation, and installation, Kang explores spatial structures that remain hidden or are not immediately visible. Guardian Deity of the Underground incorporates the surrounding space into the work, encouraging viewers to reconsider the architecture and spatial conditions of the exhibition itself.

Jihye Park explores relationships among language, signs, emotion, and memory. The Beijing exhibition includes a work evocative of writing with water on stone. As the water evaporates, the writing disappears, while the experience and memory of the act remain in another form. Through linguistic traces that appear and vanish, Park examines how cultural signs shape individual perception and memory.

Taesung Kim extends painting beyond the image on a flat surface to address the material conditions through which a painting is produced, transported, and displayed. In Beijing, multiple paintings are stacked together, while their frames are accentuated with vivid colors, directing attention away from the painted surface toward the physical structure surrounding it. His work draws attention to the frames, packaging, production, and transportation that condition how paintings exist and circulate.
 
 
 
Although the eight artists employ different subjects and formal strategies, their practices intersect through an engagement with image and material, space and body, memory and environment as conditions of rapidly changing contemporary life. Repeated moving images, installations that engage architectural structures and ruptures, and experiments that reconsider the materiality of painting evoke, in different ways, the traces of the “compressed modernity” experienced by both Busan and Beijing through rapid industrialization and urbanization.
 
The physical movement of artworks creates new conditions for interpretation. Works produced and previously understood in Busan encounter different audiences and historical and cultural contexts in Beijing, allowing new relationships and meanings to emerge.
 
In this sense, the exhibition provides an opportunity to reconsider practices formed in Busan through another East Asian city’s distinct temporality and perspective.
 
 
 
The Internationalization of a Regional Museum
 
Busan Museum of Art intends to develop the Beijing exhibition beyond a one-off overseas presentation and toward sustained international collaboration.
 
This direction reflects the recent restructuring of 《Vision and Perspective》. Rather than selecting artists for a single exhibition, the program seeks to create opportunities for them to engage with museums, curators, critics, and other art professionals in Korea and abroad, extending institutional support beyond their initial selection.
 
The Beijing exhibition represents the first international extension of nearly 27 years of accumulated experience in discovering, presenting, and documenting artists from the region.
This approach is particularly relevant within an art ecosystem in which major institutions, galleries, and international networks remain concentrated in Seoul. By connecting artistic practices developed in Busan directly with institutions and audiences in other cities, a regional museum can extend its role from discovering and presenting artists to creating the conditions for their longer-term development and international exchange.
 
If these connections continue to generate new critical evaluations, institutional relationships, and opportunities for participating artists, 《Vision and Perspective》 could develop into a long-term model through which a regional museum connects artist discovery and development with sustained international exchange.

Today Art Museum
 
Today Art Museum is a nonprofit private museum located in Beijing, China, with a program focused on contemporary art exhibitions and international cultural exchange. 《Vision and Perspective》 is the first exhibition jointly organized by Today Art Museum and Busan Museum of Art.
 
The two institutions plan to build on the project through collaborative research, academic exchange, and future co-curated exhibitions, establishing a longer-term framework for institutional collaboration.
 
 

Exhibition Information
 
Exhibition: 《Vision and Perspective》
Dates: August 23–October 7, 2026
Venue: Today Art Museum, Beijing, China
Participating Artists: Lee Kyung Kang, Mirae Kim, Jaewon Kim, Taesung Kim, Jihye Park, Hyunsung Park, Jangwoo Yoo, Hana Yoo
Co-organized by: Busan Museum of Art and Today Art Museum
Websites: Busan Museum of Art · Today Art Museum