Highlights of MMCA Global Art Collection

Collections are vital assets for museums, offering insight into the artistic and historical trends of a given era. Making their collections seen and accessible is a crucial role of museums, one that is fundamentally bound up with their very function. The Cabinet of Curiosities in 16th-century Europe, regarded as the origin of the museum, displayed rare and exotic collections, providing audiences with novel experiences and opportunities for intellectual exploration. With the rise of the modern nation-state, the definition of “public” expanded, and works of art that had once been privately owned became accessible to wider audiences, ultimately evolving into the modern museum. 

This collection exhibition presents around 40 carefully selected works from the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)’s global art collection, curated to invite fresh encounters and intellectual discovery, much like the Cabinet of Curiosities once did. Visitors can appreciate 19th-century European art from MMCA Lee Kun-hee Collection, acquired by the museum in 2001, alongside a wide range of global works that helped expand the horizons of modern art.  

The exhibition's Korean title, Water-Lily and Chandelier—a pairing of two seemingly disparate words—combines the titles of The Wate-Lily Pond (1917–1920) by Claude Monet, a representative 19th-century impressionist painter of light, and Black Chandelier (2017–2021) by Ai Wei Wei, a world-renowned contemporary artist. The conjunction and between Water-Lily, signifying nature, and Chandelier, a man-made object, suggests new possibilities of connection across time and boundaries. By reflecting on the diverse global art scenes unfolded over the 100 years between the two works, and by imagining the relationships they evoke, visitors will be invited into moments of novel experiences filled with curiosity.