SeMA-Project A is a project that explores the different spaces of the Art Archives, Seoul Museum of Art, which comprises several sites and buildings. Here, we pay a visit to the Art Archives’ new sections―from the rooftop garden of the Collaborating Space, the Learning Space to the Exchanging space―while looking at the works from SeMA collection, commissioned installation encountered in each one.

The Collaborating Space building was constructed to conform to the sloping terrain. Along the inclined path is a terraced rooftop garden formed out of cubes. In comparison with the geometric arrangement of this space, the rooftop garden sections on the second, third, and fourth floors offer works of art that adopt unique interpretations on the traditional form of production of sculpture. The starting point for this project is Untitled by artist Chung Hyun, who forgoes the creation of new shapes in favor of repurposing materials that have let go of their original function over the years. Up the stairs are Sailor by Chung Soyoung which visualizes discontinuous trajectory of time by folding and unfolding aluminum panel, and, De-veloping-Silhouette Casting by Hong MyungSeop, who has created a “de-veloping” strategy of erecting shapes cut own out two-dimensional surfaces, dissolving the traditional sculptural strategy of a casting or “enveloping” the form to fill in. In the rooftop garden on the fourth floor, new experiments in sculpting to create three-dimensional shapes are illustrated by Kim In-kyum’s Emptiness and Hong Suk-ho’s An Iron Plate Fold. In the former, the artist creates a three-dimensional sculpture that can be seen as a flat surace at a certain point of view; the latter has the surfaces of iron plates folded to show a new space where each surface meets.

Across from the Collaborating Space are the Learning Space and Exchanging Space, which connect art archives with learning and participation. In these two spaces, visitors can view artworks that raise questions about the ordinary scenes and experience we encounter every day but all too easily pass by. On the first floor of the Learning Space, visitors can imagine the small stories of things around them through Hwang Hae-sun’s The Balloons, which captures the scene when one clutches an armful of balloons. In Kim Hong-seok’s Stairs Construction–Podium, the subjects of the work are commonplace cardboard boxes that have been cast in bronze. It poses questions about the symbolism associated with the artwork’s materials, as well as the public service role symbolized by the precariously stacked boxes and the microphone podium. On the first floor of the Exchanging Space, Koh San-keum’s Baettaragi(Novel by Dong-in Kim) converts the texts of a scene from Dong-in Kim’s novel “Baettaragi” into strings of beads. In transposing the characters into beads, the artist offers a new perspective on the daily experience of reading texts.

The Art Archives’ architecture has a sprawling layout comprising different sites and pathways, as well as a layered vertical structure. SeMA-Project A encourages visitors to rediscover the artworks resituated in new environments, facilitating diverse perspectives as they roam through the Arts Archive spaces with their spreading and gathering arrangement.