SeMA Performance Breathing

The Seo-Seoul Museum of Art held SeMA Performance Breathing on March 12, 2026 as an opening exhibition. SeMA Performance presents contemporary artists whose performance-based practice is grounded in profound reflection on time, space, and human acts while supporting new works and experimentation. Posing the question “What is performance?” it imagines new uses for museum spaces through artistic movements, sounds, lighting, voices, and objets that reflect nature, culture, and history.

Heralding the start of the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art, SeMA Performance Breathing involved the participation of a total of 27 artists/teams. Approaching humans and the environment as media, the exhibition explored intersections of the body, society, and the arts under the topic of breathing, which is an organic movement. Taking air as a medium that sustains movement, cognition, and life, it examined beings, ways of living, and mutually connected relations within the atmospheric environment. Through alternating movements of opening and closing, expansion and contraction, breathing embraces the global environment into the body and, through the continued exchange of internal and external materials, generates action as a driving force in life.

In the museum space, where air drifts, the body—the basis and habitat of human existence—became an index sensing invisible changes as an ecological and ontological medium. Movements to measure and coordinate states, and variable emotions and voices simultaneously executed the scores of performances as physical and emotional actions and revealed nonlinear and polyphonic time and space.

SeMA Performance Breathing encompassed more than 70 sessions of live performances, open rehearsals, exhibitions, video screenings, dialogues, and seminars, drawing a total attendance of 29,920. Developed over approximately two years with some 200 practitioners and specialists from diverse fields, SeMA Performance Breathing sought to establish a non-hierarchical structure, transforming the Seo-Seoul Art Museum into a platform where diverse beings could meet, hybridize, and engage in exchange. Six photographers accompanied the performances as they unfolded through ongoing processes of emergence and temporary pauses, connecting the past and the present while extending into the future. Their photographs captured scenes and, at times, followed traces of the performances left behind.

A SeMA Performance web repository is also being planned to preserve traces of performances realized within the museum. Scheduled for publication in December, the catalogue for SeMA Performance Breathing will document more than two years of preparation and explore how the relationship between performance and the museum as an institution can evolve into sustainable practice.

Emerging from this encounter between performance and the museum, ongoing conversations about space and time, rehearsals and liveness, archives and collections, and participation and discourse will inform future publications, seminars, and the next SeMA Performance program alongside further research into museum operations.

Seo-Seoul Museum of Art Opening Exhibition
SeMA Performance Breathing

March 12, 2026–April 12, 2026
Seo-Seoul Museum of Art, Geumnarae Gallery

Participating artists
Donghwan Kam, Sojin Kwak, GRAYCODE, jiiiiin, KIMON, Jung Hyun Nam, Ro Kyung Ae, Dappertutto Studio, Eunju Park, Jongbin Park, Jae-Pyung Park, AN Chorong, Jeamin Cha, Min Oh, Sun Oh, HYEONTAEK OH, Jungwon Yoon, Jae Pil Eun, Minjae Lee, Shinhoo Yhi, Yunjung Lee, Jee-Ae Lim, Su-Mi Jang, Jeong Seyoung, Seungho Jo, Ikjung Cho, Jo Hyunjin, Jimin Hah, Young-jun Tak, F-A-E Archive(KWON YOHAN, KANG DANIEL, KIM SOONA), Hwang Soo Hyun

Curator and Producer
Sungmin Lee Jeong

Coordinator and Assistant Producer
Somin Kwak, Soona Kim, Soojeong PARK, Lee So Young, jiyoun lee, Daul RHEEM, Lee dohyun

Web Repository
Kii Kang

Archivist
Yoon Jung Won

Photography
Kim Taedong, Seong eui seok, AN Chorong, Dongwoong Lee, Jiyoung Lee, Choi Hyungrak

Hosted by
Seoul Museum of Art