Art after Pandemic
October 1–14, 2020
The Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism (Minister Yangwoo Park, henceforth MCST) and the Korean Culture and Information Service (Director Chulmin Kim, henceforth KOCIS) will host an international contemporary art symposium titled 2020 Korea Research Fellow: 10×10 (henceforth 2020KRF) for two weeks, from Thursday, October 1 to Wednesday, October 14.
2020KRF is part of K-Fellowship—a project initiated by KOCIS to create exchange in the field of contemporary art. Every year, KOCIS invites 10 international curators to Korea, matches them with 10 domestic curators, and establishes a forum for sharing discourse.
From a starting point of three themes—Contemporary Art, Asia, and Art and Technology—introduced at the Seoul Museum of Art in 2018, the event continued with a two-day international conference in collaboration with the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2019. Now in its third year, the event has established itself as a forum for knowledge exchange for those working in the global art world.
This year’s theme is Art After Pandemic. As the Covid-19 crisis continues, curators worldwide are discussing the path that art must take.
KOCIS swiftly changed the format of the event in response to the pandemic, replacing traditional seminars with an online forum for the intersection of diverse voices.
Starting on October 1, videos of 20 curators both individually and in conversation will be released sequentially on various online channels including the official 2020KRF homepage, Instagram, and YouTube.
This year, a number of practitioners from influential international art museums and galleries are part of the event. A total of 10 curators will participate, including Ben Vickers, CTO of the Serpentine Galleries in the UK; Melanie Bühler, curator of contemporary at the Frans Hals Museum in the Netherlands; Iris Xinru Long, an independent curator from China; Philipp Ziegler, head of curatorial department at ZKM in Germany; Li-Chen Loh, director of MOCA in Taipei; Mischa Kuball, a conceptual artist from Germany; Nasan Tur, a visual artist from Germany; Daniel Muzyczuk, head of modern art department at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in Poland; Natalie Bell, curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in the US; and Yasmine Ostendorf, founder of Green Art Lab Alliance in the Netherlands.
10 domestic curators including art exhibition planner and critic Jinsang Yoo along with Jinsuk Suh, Somi Sim, Sera Jung, Eunyoung Chae, Nathalie Boseul Shin, Yoonjung Choi, Namhee Park, Sungah Serena Choo, and Jaeyong Park will also share their voices.
2020KRF has been organised by Daehyung Lee, former artistic director of the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He has been in charge of the overall planning of the project since gravitating from program planning in 2018.
“We must gather wisdom with regard to the initiation, mode of being, and experience of art after the pandemic,” Daehyung Lee has stated. “More than ever before thanks to digital technology, a wave of information is connecting people with people, with cities, with nature, and with technology by means of human sensibility rather than that of a machine; 20 international and domestic curators as well as editors from the art media have put their heads together to address fundamental questions about how to redefine and innovate for these relationships and find answers to our questions.”
