The Seoul Museum of Art(SeMA) presents The Printed World, the 2022 pre-opening program of the Photographic Arts Center, from 6 September to 21 Octobor 2022.

The Photographic Arts Center, SeMA, a branch of the Seoul Museum of Art and Korea’s first public photography museum, is under construction with the goal of opening in 2024. It aims to establish a balanced history of Korean photography and become a museum with both expertise and popularity and both globalism and locality, with which it will be able to flexibly respond to the rapid-changing features of the photographic medium.

Prior to its opening, the Photographic Arts Center, SeMA is surveying the role and function of an art museum through a pre-opening program every year to share the construction process. Exploring the possibility of ambiguously but harmoniously connecting the region-medium-topological peculiarity of Korea-photography-art museum, The Printed World introduces the attempts at speaking in photography through the pieces from the Photographic Arts Center, SeMA’s main collection (the 1950s to the 1980s) and contemporary artworks (the 2010s to the 2020s).

SeMA began with a few questions raised in the process of collecting artworks and photographic materials. The word “printed” in the exhibition title is used to signify the state of an image “fixed” on a support. “Fixing” is a technical term that not only refers to the photochemical stage of fixing an image on a surface in the process of developing and printing the photograph but also implies the process of turning what a photographer experienced and perceived into the image. By focusing on the diversities and heterogeneities of the photographic medium from analog to digital, which are caused by the changes in technology and the media environment, it investigates the meaning and role of photography which is recontextualized both in the “history of Korean photography” and a “art museum.”

For more information: SeMA