MMCA Collection: Korean Contemporary Art | 1 May 2025 - 3 March 2027

This exhibition is the first permanent exhibition since the opening of the Seoul branch of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) in 2013. Since beginning its acquisition activities with its original opening in 1969, MMCA has collected and researched a body of significant artwork and archival materials with a focus on art history and contemporary art trends spanning more than 50 years. Out of the museum’s collection of around 11,800 pieces, this exhibition presents about 90 representative works of Korean contemporary art from the period between the 1960s and 2010s. With a selection based on subtopics representative of key themes in Korean contemporary art history, such as abstraction, experimentation, figuration, hybridity, concepts, and documentary approaches, it offers viewers a multilayered introduction to currents in Korean contemporary art through different eras.

Korean contemporary art has undergone dynamic changes in response to Korea’s own unique social situation, cultural upheavals, transformations in media, and its organic relationships with international art produced around the same time. The exhibition begins in Gallery 1, which explores representative works of Korean contemporary art from the period between the 1960s and 1980s: examples of Korean abstract art, which was created in the name of modernity and the avant-garde; works of experimental art, which expanded aesthetic boundaries based on the nature of objects and actions; and figurative and Minjung art works that sought to examine art in the context of life. Gallery 2 showcases major works of Korean contemporary art from the 1990s to the 2010s: key collection works by Korean artists who began to receive major attention from the international contemporary art scene in the context of pluralization and globalization; conceptual works centered on objects and language; and attempts at different perceptions of reality in the context of documentary and fiction.

As viewers explore a selection of major collection works representative of the complex topography of Korean contemporary art, they will be able to grasp how art has changed and unfolded in Korea’s social context. We also look forward to this exhibition serving as an opportunity to reflect on the particularity and universality of Korean contemporary art as something that has developed in a significant relationship with larger currents in international art.