I’m Sabila.

Hello, this is Leeji Hong. Thank you for the introduction, Alina.

I’m working at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, also called MMCA as an exhibition curator since 2020. I am based in Seoul, Korea, and I studied curatorial studies in the UK. And I also mentioned earlier that I am working with my colleague: curator, conservator, and researcher. I am the curatorial director in Meetingroom too.

We are curious about your journey into the museum world. Could you tell us what led you to your current role at MMCA?

In the beginning of my career, I was working as an independent curator the first time and worked at the Liverpool Biennial and Gwangju Biennial when I was studying in the UK. And after I came back from the UK, my colleagues and I, were working with a nonprofit research group called Meetingroom, which, as I mentioned before, started in 2013. And we are still doing it. We are celebrating the 10th anniversary this year. And then, I liked to have institutional experiences, so I worked at the Seoul Museum of Art, which is a metropolitan city museum in Korea for five years, and then I moved to MMCA in 2020. I'm pretty much going left to right as an independent and institutional curator and researcher, you know, something like that. So it was quite a journey.

The MMCA was founded in 1969, and it is the only national modern and contemporary art museum in Korea. We have four branches, two are in Seoul and they are called the ‘Deoksugung’ and ‘Seoul’ branches, and the others are in different areas of Korea, called Gwacheon and Cheongju. Every branch is unique and organically affiliated. For example, the Gwacheon prioritises on modern Korean art, and the Seoul branch, where I’m working at, represents not only Korean art, but modern and contemporary art in general.

My specialty is digital art, multidisciplinary, and global art. I prepare shows related to issues that work with not only Korean artists, but global artists as well. We have online projects, and MMCA continues to nurture artistic discourses while offering interesting and significant exhibitions as well as creating learning opportunities in art history for the public as well.

So looking at the scope of the museum, could you highlight some of the most memorable, or your personal favourite exhibitions at the MMCA?

It’s hard to tell the most famous or favourite exhibition we have, but now we are having a new acquisition collection show and experimental art in Korea 1960-70, in cooperation with the Guggenheim, New York, and also my project called the ‘Game Society’ exhibition at the same time. With this diverse exhibition programme, we also have a film and video, and portfolio programme as well. We have quite big spaces, including the cinema and the performance space as well.

Personally, my favourite Exhibition Program in MMCA could be the Hyundai Motor Series that has been presenting one Korean artist every year since 2014. The project aims to expand the boundary of Korean contemporary art and provide a platform that connects leading Korean artists with a wider audience globally. We present Lee Bul, Haegue Young, Suja Kim, and many other artists. We are celebrating our 10th edition this year. We will see what we have done so far.

We have social network channels, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube as well. Unfortunately, we don't have our own server and channel, so we use outside platforms like YouTube. We are always very passionate about presenting online and doing live streams through these kinds of platforms. You can check our social networks channel. You can follow what we're doing in Seoul.

Since we couldn't connect with anyone in last three years, we were eager to reconnect with people and try to fill in with being together. During the pandemic, we had a lot of followers in our social network platforms. And now on our Instagram, we have 200,000 followers and 1 million audience visit in one single exhibition. It is like before the pandemic. We were still not allowed to travel far from our country, so we are still very curious about what is happening in far far away. It is very difficult for everyone to experience the time differences and the physical spaces, the timeline, border, et cetera. So museums should have some role to connect people in our platform, not only in the physical space, but on the online platforms as well. It is very much our aim for people to reconnect everywhere.

I think for that reason, digital strategy and digital art programme could be really helpful to make it happen. So we tried very hard to build some ‘real-time’ feel for people that we connected with, not for the media. We're recording it, we're breathing at the same time, you're feeling the real time sensation at the same time. We are preparing the long-term strategy for museums to survive, for everyone, not just in Korea.

So Leeji, you mentioned that your museum used a lot of digital tools to engage people during the pandemic. Could you talk about the challenges and opportunities during this tricky period for the MMCA?

Like other museums and other institutions in the world, we made many online programmes and online exhibitions in the last three years. Even though we were making some physical exhibitions in the space, we couldn't open the space for the public, so we recorded every single thing and scanned every piece of the works, and put them online. At the same time, we were very much focusing on our collection, because we couldn't afford transportation from other countries. We were making some digital commission works with the young generation and young artists.

We were working with educators and invented interesting education programmes with them. We made educational kits and delivered them through post office, sent them to houses, made some online programmes. We did Zoom, we were engaging with the audience through the online channel and made some artworks together. We toured the exhibition together, we did something like that in the museum. And for these efforts, we were selected as the ‘World’s Best 10 Online Museums’ in 2021, from The Guardian. It was quite an interesting moment for us.

We have a creative program called ‘Delivery in Art’ - not in the Seoul branch, but in the Cheongju branch in the Southern part of Korea.

Because it is very hard to go to Cheongju branch, one of the curators made some ‘delivering curatorial’ programmes. We made manuals: how to see the works and how to have your own way to recreate the artwork. We made some boxes and deliver them directly when people ask for them. So it was quite D-I-Y style, and it was very much an adventure for us as well. The people were, first of all, not familiar with our ways to interact with this kind of kit, but in the end, they have very much created their own way to recreate something and share everything in our SNS (social networking services). So it is quite interesting to see how people were eager to engage with others with their own creative objects or works.

In Korea, the museum is very much the “centre” of the city. So not only for people to see artworks and enjoy exhibitions, the space itself functions as some kind of a gathering place, a meeting point, a place to share their knowledge and talk to each other. That is also why we are very much focusing on different kinds of education programmes as well.

We are now focusing more on disabled people,  youngsters, or people who are having trouble with seeing, or feeling, or touching. We are thinking about these kinds of people who are, you know, away from the museum and culture experience. So we are focusing on the other side, or, you know, not the usual audience. We are pretty much putting our effort into developing or creating some unique program for them.

I think from now on, we will never think about things without considering the digital way. We relatedly think about the physical offline and online together at the same time, and we couldn't think about life without mobile phones. I don’t know, In Korea, everyone is so obsessed with their mobile phones. It is very hard to imagine life without a mobile phone. People who visit our website, more than 95% came from mobile, not PC or other platforms. So mobile is a really important platform for us to find out the way to engage with the public.

We're thinking about the format of the mobile, function, and the setting to face the mobile environment. It is very important that the mobile condition and the way people scroll, the way of seeing and reading something, becomes the starting point of what we have to deliver, or the storytelling to the public. It is very much a unique way compared to the past, because we were never thinking about the way people read or scroll, or the format of the mobile phone, because we were always thinking about rectangular format. But nowadays, when we are filming something, recording something, we think about the mobile format or Instagram format as well. So, this kind of thing makes us rethink about the environment, how to see something, and how to read something. So, it is very important for us.

So given this shift towards mobile use, could you give us a real example from the museum where we can see this?

Nowadays, we're focusing more on Instagram live. In the past, when we provided some information or documentation with videos, we took them with the camera in 4:3 or 16:9 format, but nowadays, we are taking most of the recording or documentation with our mobile, because this is modified mobile, because nowadays more than 95% people will see it through their mobile phones. So, this is our starting point with the setting or strategy to deliver to the people. So, it has changed the method or the technical devices from the beginning. It is also very important to engage the people, how we ended up making conversation with it. So we're also thinking about the reply and how to make conversation with this kind of format, how can we provide this live, or the recording or edited version of it. There are many things that we have to think about.

I just came back from France, because I went on a business trip to Paris, and I heard that in Europe they have been very much struggling with the electricity fee, which is very very high. So they have been thinking if media arts can survive this kind of circumstance. Or, you know, the other person I met in Europe also mentioned that today there is a war going on.

So, when there is physical attack, or when we are going through a war… Korea is a very unstable country. So we are always thinking about these kinds of things. We’re thinking about digital art or media art, how would they survive through that physical attack because as I mentioned before, we don't have a national server system yet. So when we have a war in Seoul, for instance, and we have to go away. Would the people who are charged with protecting our national collection, would he or she bring some USBs or files with them? I doubt. They will just grab or pack some really important paintings or sculptures first, not the digital file, you know. So we have to think about the life of the video art and digital file in times of a crisis or catastrophe.

And then we also have to think about hacking and copyright issues as well. Because several years ago, we had our Instagram account hacked. So it was a nightmare for us, for just two days.

We always face these kinds of dangers of using others’ platforms.

Also, the last thing is regularity. We have many diverse generations working at the museum, also the audience is very, very much diverse. They have different approaches on using digital tools and being online or in person. Some audiences have known and are very professional with digital devices, but for others it is really hard to just buy the ticket. We are thinking about these kinds of extreme cases all together, and we have to provide a stable environment worthy of everyone. This is quite challenging.

Digital strategies are obviously essential for museums to attract younger audiences today. What kind of efforts have you done to carry out these strategies?

We have a lot of young generation audiences, especially last year. I assume that was because RM from BTS visits our museum frequently. So, they feel like they are sharing their experience with him, as well as the young influencers and celebrities who visit our museum a lot. For the young generation it is quite a different experience compared to the older generation, I can say traditional audiences. They want to take a picture obviously, which they will be sharing. They are living in the moment as they are touring the space. Experiencing the museum space becomes really important for the young generation, so we have to think about the kind of experience that we could offer them.

Also, when making or curating exhibitions, we would think about other ways to introduce these exhibitions. We would also think about other ways to introduce them. When we first make or create an exhibition, we would automatically think of how we would represent them digitally. Is it about PR, is it about Instagram, or about a related education programme? So we would basically make two projects with the same content. We think about the differences between the physical and online project, and at the same time, we have to understand the different functions and different environments each platform has.

Money is quite important to maintain everything, but I'm thinking about openness to everyone. Because if you want to be a curator, you have to take very good care of your neighbours and be a witness to what the city and even Earth are going through. So, how can we be open? You know, for example, are you willing to open the museum to the homeless people? Or are you willing to be open to someone else, not the regular audience. Will you be ready to do that? It is quite obvious that museums have some strict issues and we have prejudices in some ways. So how can we be “open” for everyone? That is a very important question for me.

Thank you, Leeji. It was a pleasure having you.