Before/After Mass Studies Does Architecture
November 20, 2014–February 1, 2015
PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art
55 Sejong-daero
Jung-gu, Seoul
Korea 100-716
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm
T +82 2 2259 7726
PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art presents Before/After Mass Studies Does Architecture, an exhibition of of the architect Minsuk Cho. With the constant blurring between the boundaries of art and architecture, the exhibition reexamines architecture as a concurrent force of contemporary art that shapes the cultural terrain of our time. As the everyday gains importance, contemporary art emphasizes the experience of the artwork as a site-specific, architectural space. Contemporary architecture, on the other hand, delves into installations within the spaces of art and publicity and the performative nature of the discipline.
Before/After provides an overview of Cho’s work over the past 12 years. Centered on the before and after of doing architecture, it offers a critical reflection on the status of the architectural discipline in Korea and in the global arena. Minsuk Cho studies the fundamentals of architecture and observes the logic of high-density urban life. While acknowledging that architecture operates within the mechanisms of the market, it proposes productive alternatives that imagine anew our identity and our relations of space. While incorporating existing systems such as the flat slab, Cho’s concepts such as systematic heterogeneity, time-specific architecture, collective intimacy, and domino/dome-ino are intertwined with structural, material, spatial, and programmatic transformations that present the possibility of new ways of living.
Mass Studies works in a period of rapid change. During the past 20 years, Korea’s construction industry has shrunk in proportion to the explosive growth of internet use. In this situation, architecture as a productive medium of sense, knowledge, and capital enters a critical stage of evolution. Irrespective of the architect’s intention, architecture is consumed and reproduced within an infinite space. Architectural projects remain mostly unrealized and their before and after seem to exist as two parallel universes. In this reality, what is done in the in-between is crucial. Against the notion of architecture as a crystallized set of complete buildings, Before/After highlights architecture as a temporal and physical presence, as the multidimensional performances of diverse actors. Before/After proposes that architecture is a process for producing not only buildings but also sense and knowledge.
Co-curated by Soyeon Ahn, Deputy Director, PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art
and Hyungmin Pai, Professor, University of Seoul
PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art was first inaugurated in 1999 as Rodin Gallery, presenting its permanent installation of Auguste Rodin’s monumental masterpieces The Gates of Hell and The Burghers of Calais, and has established itself as one of the central institutions in the Korean contemporary art scene.
In May 2011, Rodin Gallery reopened its doors under the new name, PLATEAU, aspiring a broader scope of program, as well as higher artistic grounds for artists and patrons alike. With the new name, PLATEAU expresses our renewed commitment to embracing the dynamic developments in Korean and international contemporary art, in continuation with our permanent display of the Rodin masterpieces.
Press contact:
Shim Bokeum, Public Relations Team
T +82 2 2014 6553 / bokeum.shim [at] samsung.com
