What transpires when two countries with vastly different cultures and seemingly divergent histories—South Korea and the United Arab Emirates—independently open a circuit of cultural exchange, confrontation and reflection, selecting one of the most inflated yet persistently timely terms—“medium”—as the central theme? In the past year, museums around the globe have staged several exhibitions dedicated to Korean art and artists, building on the momentum of the Korean Wave as that country—and its corporate giants—invest in culture as a tool of soft power. Last week, a major exhibition opened at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi, marking the first extensive survey of Korean art from the 1960s to today in the U.A.E. Dually organized by the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (ADMAF) and the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), the show goes beyond one-directional soft-power branding to establish a reciprocal platform for intercultural dialogue.
Co-curated by SeMA’s Kyung-hwan Yeo and independent curator Maya El Khalil, “Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits” centers on the intersection of body, society and technology. The show inaugurates a two-part initiative developed through a three-year collaboration between the two institutions. Paired exhibitions will deepen engagement between the U.A.E. and Korea, while drawing meaningful parallels between their respective art scenes—particularly in how artists from both countries have responded to rapid urbanization and the compressed timelines of modern development that continue to shape their national identities.
While the exhibition originated from a desire to investigate deeply and surface stories rarely told in the U.A.E., El Khalil tells Observer that the theme was chosen to invite people in. “We thought that could be a very interesting entry point for the audience here, particularly with the younger ones,” she explains. “These pioneers from the 1960s up to today have experimented with media as both a reflection of society and as a way to both confront and accompany the rapid changes reshaping our world.”
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The title “Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits” reflects on the multilayered nature of the concept of medium as something that has shaped new possibilities for human connection. Focusing on how Korean artists have engaged with evolving technologies to respond to societal transformations, the exhibition brings together forty-eight works by twenty-nine artists, offering an intergenerational reflection and conversation on the layered relationship between innovation and tradition. Here, body, society and space emerge as mediums in their own right—primal filters through which we already perceive, influence, and are influenced by our environments, as meaning unfolds through embodied interaction within these entangled frameworks, even before being complemented by any other technological tool.
Notably, all the works on view in Abu Dhabi come from the collection of the Seoul Museum of Art. They carry with them the heritage and memory of the country from which they originate, embodying fragments of its recent history, yet at the same time, they open up new perspectives on shared present conditions and future evolutions that are reshaping how we engage with the world. In parallel, the works that will be shown in Seoul will come from U.A.E. collections, reflecting both the country’s cultural heritage and commitment to supporting the arts.
Opening in December, the follow-up exhibition, “Intense Proximities,” will bring three generations of U.A.E. artists—from the 1980s to today—to the Seoul Museum of Art, exploring how they have confronted the rapid pace of change by focusing on the challenges and complexities that emerge in the tension between the local and the global. “We tend to think of the U.A.E. as a new country, one that truly came together in the 1970s, but it is, first of all, a melting pot of cultures made up of people from across the region, many of whom arrived with stories of political upheaval and economic migration, which creates unexpected affinities with South Korea’s own history,” El Khalil says, adding that artistic practices in both countries seem to be driven by a shared tension: the desire to remain rooted in tradition while simultaneously embracing innovation, forging new and distinct contemporary languages that reflect evolving notions of national identity. “Of course, we are naturally looking toward the future—technology is propelling us in that direction. But increasingly, we can also observe a countercurrent, as artists on both sides attempt to hold on to and look back toward tradition.”
At the same time, this partnership creates opportunities on both sides to revisit the collections and explore new meanings for these artworks within unfamiliar geographical, cultural and technological contexts. “In this new globalized era, with all kinds of changes and challenges we’re facing, we have to revisit the meaning of our collections—to interrogate what it means to hold a public art collection,” Yeo tells Observer.
“We really wanted to embrace Nam June Paik’s dream of open circuits,” El Khalil adds. “We have these artworks, we’ve created these connections—but then we want different audiences to extract meaning, to contribute. Because it’s not one-way: this exhibition takes on an expanded meaning when it begins to be interpreted, when it opens questions and creates space for discussion.”
It’s significant that the two-chapter initiative of intercultural engagement will ultimately be accompanied by the publication Layered Dialogues, featuring essays by writers and critics from both countries reflecting on one another’s artistic landscapes. Extending the project’s reach even further, the partnership also includes a program of residencies, commissioned works and a public program of talks, screenings and performances, creating additional opportunities for dialogue and exchange between the two cities.
The evolution of Korean art confronting technological evolution
Anchoring the entire show is a statement by pioneering Korean artist Nam June Paik, who in 1966 declared, “We Are in Open Circuits,” foreseeing many of the consequences of the technological transformations that would come to reshape how humans communicate, connect and interact. His groundbreaking exploration of video—and the implications of the “hyperconnectivity” in which we are now immersed—is further highlighted through an insightful documentary, Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV (2023), directed by Amanda Kim, and screened during the opening days of the exhibition.
At the entrance of the show, Nam June Paik’s TV-based installation Self-Portrait Dharma Wheel functions as an introduction to a selection of pioneering artists who, beginning in the 1960s and ‘70s, embarked on groundbreaking experiments with electricity, light and moving images. These artists approached new technologies as tools to confront Korea’s profound societal transitions at the time, remediating traditional principles through novel frameworks to formulate new, yet still distinctively Korean, visual languages. The result is a parallel and synchronized dialogue with both past and future, tradition and innovation, already exemplified in Paik’s symbolic self-portrait: by combining video monitors with Buddhist iconography in a circular, mandala-like formation that echoes the dharma wheel, he creates a totemic presence that channels spiritual resonance for the technological age of media communication.
Similarly, Park Hyunki’s Untitled (TV Fishbowl), 1979, offers a wry critique of television’s propagandistic potential. Featuring goldfish quietly swimming inside what appears to be a water-filled tank, the piece transforms the TV screen into an illusionistic aquarium that questions the boundary between digital image and reality while warning against the passive absorption of televised messaging, which is capable of shaping perception and consciousness itself, “domesticating” its viewers.
Claiming a more active, creatively engaged relationship with the medium, Lee Kang-So, in a Pollock-like performance, explores the capacity of video to document and expand the performative dimensions of traditional Korean painting. His work is a hybrid of physicality, endurance, meditation and contemplation. This conscious embodiment of space and gesture—what he presents as an “event logic”—is further echoed in Lee Kun-Yong’s 1975 performance Logic of Place, which invites viewers into a heightened awareness of site, language and material as experiential constructs. In contrast to the passivity of the television audience, these works call for an active, mindful presence anchored in time, space and movement.
From this initial act of “opening circuits” initiated by the experimental practices of these pioneering artists, the exhibition unfolds without adhering to a strict chronology. Instead, it embraces a thematic approach, exploring the notion of ‘medium’ as both material and spatial condition, as well as a tool of communication and connection. As already suggested by Yong and Kang-So, the body is the first and most immediate medium through which we filter and connect with the world via sensory perception and psychological elaboration that continuously shapes our understanding of reality.
In the works on show, Korean artists from different generations play with social stereotypes and behavioral codes to interrogate and expose the body as a contested site—one rife with tensions and contradictions, especially in today’s context of constant interchange between the physical and the technological, the sensorial and the virtual. The body is made to endure continuous modification, mediation and multiplication with experiences fragmented and layered across multiple realms. In this environment of fluid technology and accelerated transformation, the notion of the physical body, or the individual identity, as fixed, stable entities becomes an impossible mirage. Any crystallized ideal of beauty or propriety is disrupted in the constant flux, as Lee Bul’s Untitled (Crystal Figure) seems to suggest.
Personality and identity emerge as unstable performances enacted between the screen and real life, risking a growing disconnect between the authentic self and its projected persona, as explored in the Instagram-inspired paintings of Moka Lee. This precarious, porous boundary between the digital and the physical becomes even more pronounced when we are confronted with the raw, undeniable reality of the body—its physicality, vulnerability and visceral presence. And yet, this awareness also reawakens a longing for genuine tactile experience, as hinted at in Woo Hannah’s soft-fabric sculptures.
Still, the body and its capacity to generate language remain our most fundamental instruments of communication—channels through which the inner world is expressed externally. In Min Oh’s two-channel video Étude for Étude (Music Performance), the performer’s mouth becomes a rhythmic tool, engaging in a ritual of repetition and refinement, an act of reclaiming presence, of reacquiring the awareness of the body’s potential to interact with others and with its surrounding space.
Society, then, becomes another medium—one that, especially today through new technologies, establishes a network of collective narratives and inherited knowledge that shape our processes of meaning-making. These structures influence how we encounter other bodies and environments, informing our social performances and exchanges, as meaning emerges through the circulation and reiteration of messages.
In this section, several works inevitably confront the role of political events in shaping and determining collective consciousness and lived experience. One of the most striking is the VR installation Kubo Walks the City (2021) by artist Hayoun Kwon, who brilliantly employs advanced technologies to revisit and reframe the past. By inviting viewers to navigate an animated reconstruction of colonial-era Seoul, Kwon forces a reconsideration of history and its enduring imprint on the present.
Similarly, Young In Hong’s intricate embroideries return attention to marginalized episodes in Korea’s recent past, re-materializing in tactile form the overlooked lives of low-wage workers. By weaving together personal and collective narratives, her works expose the space between them—a place of translation gaps and frictions—where official histories falter in capturing the complex layering of human experience and circumstance.
This vulnerability, or even failure, of official history is also at the core of Sojung Jun’s video Early Arrival of Future, which explores the unfamiliarity and estrangement between South and North Korea, which are distanced not only by politics but by a fundamental lack of shared information and communication. Here, Jun suggests how a more universal language like music could be used as a poetic, human tool that bridges this divide with the power to transcend political, cultural and linguistic barriers, and to awaken empathy and solidarity where dialogue has failed.
As demonstrated by the unresolvable and unbridgeable line that has divided South and North Korea since the 1970s, space is the third layer of ‘medium’ that deeply influences both individual and societal interaction. The works in this section reveal how spaces are never neutral containers; rather, they are often intentionally or strategically designed to invite or enforce specific behaviors and interactions, or conversely, to suppress and deny them. As stages where both collective and personal experiences unfold, spaces can reinforce societal and political infrastructures, orienting and containing those experiences within defined ideological or symbolic frameworks.
Haegue Yang’s Yes-I-Know-Screen—ten traditional Korean doors made of wood and changhoji paper—explores this compartmentalization of experience and meaning, evoking the tension between traditional spatial structures and the potential of innovative ruptures. Similarly, Minouk Lim’s video S.O.S–Adoptive Dissensus (2009) addresses the psychological and sensorial violence embedded in the pressures of public space as a surveilled, accelerated and hyper-exposed arena where the human is both revealed and rendered vulnerable.
In this context, particularly striking is how the tension between societal control and the agency of critical thought and emotional interiority finds form in Byungjun Kwon’s robotic creatures in Dancing Ladders (2022). Slowly navigating space with mechanical precision, these beings seem to resist the hyperproductive logic of the environments they ostensibly belong to. Instead, they gesture toward a different temporality grounded in reflection, awareness and embodied presence. As robotic ladders—symbols of ascent—they refuse the relentless push for societal competition, technological advancement and maximum efficiency. They subversively suggest a return to slowness, to a more consciously aware and contemplative relationship between the body, society and the spaces we inhabit.
Overall, the exhibition not only retraces major transformations within Korean society and how Korean art has responded to them, but also opens our eyes to how these shifts are increasingly experienced on a global scale. As more countries enter the race for modernization and technological advancement, they risk severing the most primal connections between body and space and between individuals and society.
This disconnection gives rise to the pervasive sense of alienation and displacement that many artists have articulated here, and which will find an internationally resonant echo in the follow-up exhibition. There, U.A.E. artists will stage their own negotiation of the tension between local and global, tradition and innovation, personal identity and imposed narratives—this time in South Korea, where similarly rapid development has left little space for reflection or pause. In that context, the value of these types of intercultural art initiatives becomes even more clear, as they offer not just a mirror, but a transtemporal and transgeographical lens through which we might begin to understand these shared, accelerated realities and how they have often been anticipated and then analyzed by artists in different regions.
“Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits” is on view at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi through June 30, 2025.
