MMCA Gwacheon embraces 'Imaginations in Light' as it marks 40 years

Museums usually spend a lot of money to keep light out of their buildings, but the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea’s (MMCA) Gwacheon branch chose that very theme for its 40th anniversary. “MMCA Gwacheon, 40th Anniversary: Imaginations in Light” opens on Friday with three partial exhibitions and new signage for the museum throughout.

The MMCA Gwacheon building, designed by architect Kim Tae-soo, opened in 1986 on the outskirts of Seoul. Its 30th anniversary exhibition 10 years ago looked backward, into its own history. However, since the MMCA's Seoul branch opened in 2013 and slowly took over covering contemporary art, Gwacheon has been free to experiment out of the spotlight.

“History matters, of course, but what mattered more was how to show the Gwacheon of today, and how to connect that to the future,” said Lee Soo-youn, one of the three main curators of the “Imaginations in Light” exhibition, during a press conference at the MMCA Gwacheon on Thursday. “So we decided to take the word ‘past’ out of the 40th anniversary show entirely.”

“The thing we kept saying to each other while we were planning was that outside, there is the light of nature, and inside the museum, there is the light of art,” Lee said. “What we wanted was to connect those two, and to find a way for a visitor to take both in at once.”

As the first of the three exhibitions comprising the “Imaginations in Light” show, the “Lightscape” section features French artist Philippe Parreno’s “Marquee” (2019), shown inside the museum lobby for the first time since it was acquired: a cinema sign in neon and light-emitting diode, blinking out a program for a film that will not start.

“We always feel some expectation when we walk into a cinema or a theater,” Lee said. “Something is about to happen, something is about to change. That anticipation is what Parreno’s work is made of.”

Behind Parreno’s installation is Nam June Paik's “The More the Better” (1988), which the curators called a “sleeping dragon” of the MMCA Gwacheon that has always been there. Visitors have to meet the marquee before they can get to the dragon. Then, upstairs on the bridge of the lobby, Kim A-young’s award-winning video work “Delivery Dancer's Arc: Inverse” (2024) has been rebuilt with the artist as an light-emitting diode installation, its sound removed, its panel cut into an irregular shape.

The second section, “Afterimage,” makes the circular gallery at the MMCA Gwacheon a viewing space again, which it had not been for 10 years; it had previously become a room with chairs. It is now split between U.S. artist James Turrell and Chilean artist Ivan Navarro. The Turrell work, “Imaginings, Wide Rectangular Curved Glass” (2021), was given to the museum in 2025 and has never been shown before.

“The light changes very slowly, as though it were breathing, and the density and the layers of it change with it,” said Lee. “It isn’t light you look at. It’s light you experience.”

Somewhat in contrast to Turrell’s outward-light installation, Navarro’s mirrored boxes look like wells with no bottom.

“Navarro grew up in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, and that government controlled the population by cutting off the electricity, by cutting off light,” Lee said. “That runs underneath everything he makes — light as power and as beauty at once.”

The third section, “Lingering Grounds,” a collection of installations, exists because of an instruction.

“The largest task Gwacheon was given when it opened in 1986 was to build a museum with an outdoor sculpture park,” said Lee Hyun-ju, the curator in charge of the “Lingering Grounds” section. “Everything newly installed for the 40th anniversary was requested on the premise that visitors could touch it, sit on it, lean against it, use it with their bodies.”

In the “Lingering Grounds” section, artist Kim Ha-neul's 40 sofas are discarded fish crates from Soraepogu harbor, coated in the polyurea used on armored vehicles, while Hwang Hyung-shin’s polished steel reflects the sky and a good number of Gwacheon's magpies. A total of five Korean installation artists participated in making new works for “Lingering Grounds.”

Asked what the MMCA Gwacheon’s identity has been for 40 years, and what it will be for the next 40, the “fact of these 40 years itself is the identity,” said Kang Soo-jung, senior curator at the museum.

“The identity of Gwacheon is 1986, the 40 years it has stood here,” Kang said. “The MMCA’s overall collection started at this very spot with a few small works, and now it comes to more than 12,000.”

All three sections of the “Imaginations in Light” exhibition open on Friday, with different closing dates: “Lightscape” and “Lingering Grounds” run until Nov. 29, while “Afterimage” closes on Oct. 31. Admission is 3,000 won ($2) for adults.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]