At Seoul’s museums, visitors are invited to make, move and listen anew

Museums in Korea increasingly offer more than art viewing; they offer hands-on experiences, from crafts and dance to flower arrangement and sound walks, to attract more visitors.

Exhibition-linked programs have long meant lectures and docent tours in the past.

This year, museums in Seoul asked visitors to use their hands, bodies and ears instead of simply becoming an audience and listening to curators narrate an explanation.

Last Saturday, Centre Pompidou Hanwha in Yeouido, western Seoul, held “Blooming Season,” a bouquet-making class run with the flower brand Bird Fleur. The class was tied to “The Garden Project,” an exhibition featuring three artists: sculptor Kim Yun-shin, who carves wood and stone, contemporary artist Shin Mee-kyoung, who sculpts in soap, and contemporary artist Cho O-myo, whose work draws on vines, roots and unfamiliar life forms.

“Rather than recreating the works in the exhibition with flowers, we took inspiration from the way the artists look at nature and give it form, so that participants could see flowers anew,” said Choi Seon-mi, who runs Bird Fleur and who oversaw the bouquet-making class. “The grain and vitality of nature in Kim’s work became a way of looking at the forms of flowers and stems, and the time and change in Shin’s work became the way flowers bloom and wither.”

Ten adults joined each of the two sessions. They spent the first 20 minutes studying leaf texture and the curve and direction of stems, then spent an hour building their own bouquets from iris, tulips, cosmos and cockscomb. Cho’s vines and roots were the starting point for combining different plants into new movements.

“Where a typical flower class might focus on the skill of finishing a bouquet, this time we also gave meaning to observing the form and texture of the flowers and discovering what is particular to each plant,” Choi said. “I hoped the class would be more than an afternoon spent finishing a single bouquet, and that participants would carry what they sensed in the exhibition into their daily lives through flowers and plants.”

SeMA Buk-Seoul Museum of Art in Nowon District, northern Seoul, held its own flower workshop on Sept. 4 and 18 for “2026 Title Match Oh In-hwan vs. Chang Seo-young.” The workshop was named after “Flower Arrangement for Men,” a work by conceptual artist Oh that looks back on the times he received flowers as a man.

Oh has previously shown the piece as framed texts — the circumstances of each occasion, the meanings of the flowers and instructions for arranging them — alongside a bouquet or basket made newly for every exhibition. This time, Oh and a florist guided eight participants per session to make the bouquets and baskets themselves, and the exhibition displayed the results. Despite the title, the workshop was open to any adult, not just men.

Earlier in the year, the SeMA Buk-Seoul Museum of Art also held “Connected Bodies,” an improvised movement workshop for “Somatic Ground,” an exhibition by artist Yoo Se-mi, who also works as a carpenter and furniture designer for her own brand, Small Studio Semi. The choreography team Jongdaljeong led three sessions, the first with seniors and the second and third with people with developmental disabilities, built around the show’s interest in connection with others and community.

“The most important keyword of the exhibition is the body,” a museum representative said. “Because the exhibition is about moving the body freely, relaxing it and at times waking up the senses, we hoped a program in which people actually moved their bodies would happen inside the gallery.”

At the MMCA, the focus of interactive and collaborative events alongside new exhibitions was material and technique. During the opening week of Do Ho Suh’s solo exhibition in August, the museum worked with STPI, a nonprofit print and paper workshop in Singapore that has collaborated with Suh since 2009.

In “Drawing Home With Thread,” held Aug. 28 and 30 and based on Suh’s thread drawings, participants made works about their own homes on STPI’s handmade paper under a professional papermaker. In “Memories Recorded in Light,” on Aug. 29, STPI’s printmakers guided participants through works on home and memory.

This Friday, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art holds “Deep Listening and Noise Orchestra,” linked to “The Universally Valid You,” a solo exhibition by artist Sim Lee Da-eun centered on sensing others. Oh Young-jin, a professor at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, will introduce American composer Pauline Oliveros’s deep listening, a meditative practice that separates hearing from attentive listening, and Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s art of noises.

Around 20 participants will then record sounds around the museum on their phones and spend the final hour playing them back together as an orchestra. A second session is set for Nov. 20.

On Saturday and Sunday, Buk-Seoul will also hold “Side by Side Museum,” which pairs visually impaired and sighted participants, 10 of each per day, to view the “Human Error” exhibition with audio describer Seo Su-yeon’s guidance, tactile materials and conversation. The program recently won an Outstanding Museum Practice Award from the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art.

“Aside from high satisfaction survey results from participants in our programs, what stands out is the rate of return visits,” said Kim So-myeong, curator in charge of the program at Buk-Seoul. “Visually impaired participants who first came to our museum through ‘Side by Side’ in 2023 or 2024 have kept joining every year and now visit regularly.”

What participants made this year at the Centre Pompidou Hanwha, the MMCA and at Buk-Seoul Museum of Art included bouquets, homes drawn in thread and a recording of the streets around a museum. Each was tied to a work in the galleries, and each was made by people who came to look.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]