GanaArt Collection: Beneath Technology: Scenes at the Threshold

Bosun Ahn, Jae Hyung Hwang, Boc Su Jung, In Soon Kim, Jung Heun Kim, Sejin Kim, Yong Tae Kim, Heung Duk Lee, Jong Gu Lee, Myoung Bok Lee, Sang Guk Lee, Won Chul Lee, Kyung Hwan Oh, Bul Dong Park, Eun Tae Park, Heung Soon Park, Hak Cheul Shin, Je Nam Shin

The Seoul Museum of Art presents the GanaArt Collection Beneath Technology: Scenes at the Threshold. SeMA has been organizing a series of planned permanent exhibitions based on approximately 200 Korean realist works from the 1980s-90s, a gift of Lee Ho Jae, Chairman of Gana Art, in 2001.

In this iteration, the exhibition focuses on technology, presenting 16 works from the SeMA-GanaArt Collection alongside 10 works from the SeMA Collection, and explores the relationship between art, society, and evolving technological environments.

Beneath Technology: Scenes at the Threshold highlights the landscape of Korean society as it took shape amid the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and transformation of the media environment that defined the period from the 1970s through the 1990s. Development of technology and industry not only altered modes of material production but also transformed the character of individuals and communities as well as the very ways in which reality was perceived and sensed.

As capitalist economic development converged with technological advancement, Korean society achieved remarkable growth, yet behind that growth lay another landscape - one of social fracture. Focusing on the scenes of rapid social change, this exhibition examines how art captured and gave form to the sense of reality and lived experience amid sociocultural upheaval.

The period from the 1970s through the 1990s saw accelerated reorganization: rural populations migrated en masse to explosively expanding cities, while industrial capital and mass media converged to forge a new order. Technology operated not merely as a tool but as a condition that transformed everyday life and experiences. Realist artists of the time did not stop at merely representing circumstances; they sought to expose the structural tensions and ruptures latent beneath the surface.

Translating the reconfigured landscapes of daily life and the emotional tenor of the era into visual language, they constructed another order of sensory reality. For them, artistic creation was a critical practice - an inquiry into what aspects of reality to look at and how.

The visual culture that unfolded upon the new material foundations of rural and urban reorganization, shifting labor conditions, and the proliferation of consumer culture and mass media served as a significant visual register through which the sense of reality found expression.

The exhibition is organized into three sections, each illuminating a distinct perspective on technology: Amid Flickering Lights, The Abyss of a New Order, and Resplendent Void. Revisiting the technological landscapes of the past, the exhibition offers a broader vantage point from which to survey our own position at the threshold of future technology.