Abu Dhabi meets Seoul in avant-garde exhibition that shows human connections in tech evolution

Al Etihad

15-05-2025

15 May 2025 22:11
SARA AL ZAABI (ABU DHABI)South Korea's capital Seoul is bringing distinctive cultural narratives to Abu Dhabi in an avant-garde exhibition that traces how technology has shaped human connections - even before the internet existed.Titled "Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits - Contemporary Art from Korea, 1960s to Today", the exhibition opens today and runs until June 30 at Manarat Al Saadiyat. The art show, organised through collaboration between Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation (ADMAF) and Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), marks the first phase in a three-year institutional partnership between the UAE and South Korea.Forty-eight works by 29 artists will go on display in the exhibition that winds its way through six decades of Korea's avant-garde art, exploring ideas of identity, memory, tradition, and modernity.
Drawn from SeMA's collection, the art show extracts themes that can "tell certain narratives of the development of experimental art and new media in Korea", curator Maya El Khalil told Aletihad . Presenting these Korean narratives in Abu Dhabi makes the exhibition even more interesting, El Khaili said, as the emirate is bound to have "a different reading" of these materials. Abu Dhabi and Seoul both have distinctive cultures but tying them together is a common approach to development. Both cities, El Khaili said, remain "rooted in the importance of tradition and identity" while embracing innovation.Co-curator Kyung-hwan Yeo described the exhibition as a dialogue between Abu Dhabi and Seoul, exploring their cultural connections and differences."We tried to find a way to present the reason and the purpose, to ask authentic questions: Why do we need to explore similarities and differences? Do we face the same future or different futures?"Yeo added: "This exhibition wants to show and raise questions together. We are part of the communication, part of one family in a bigger perspective."This concept of "open circuits" represents communication as an ongoing, two-way exchange, El Khaili said. "We should be in a state of communication where the flow is not a one-way flow. It is like we are all part of this conversation."
Social Ladders Explaining another common denominator for the two cultures, Yeo noted the shared artistic struggles of Emirati and Korean artists navigating tradition and modernity."It is exactly the same situation; how to combine the traditional and contemporary," she said. Byungjun Kwon's Dancing Ladders (2022 Reactivated: 2025), for example, challenges the notion of social ladders. It features metal contraptions moving along tracks laid down on the ground - showing some work in progress and "transmitted stress" from the old machinery to new robots. "Young people feel pressure to climb the social ladder… But this artwork transforms that hierarchy. The riders move horizontally, not vertically… a new way of thinking, a new way of living," Yeo said.
"We are really complicated and layered - not fixed. We keep moving. And in this kind of movement, we can make a circuit and move together," she said.