Jeffrey Inaba, Bjarke lngels, Ma Yansong, Cho Minsuk

The Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art presents an architectural show as its last planned exhibition in 2008. It is across-genre exhibition which is one of the museum’s four major planned art shows designed to explore interactions between art and its neighboring genres as well as its interdisciplinary effects. This year’s cross-genre exhibition titled gyeonggimoma@ansan is an architectural show illuminating and examining new issues of contemporary architecture in the context of contemporary art.

Among the invited artists are American architect Jeffrey Inaba, Copenhagen based architect Bjarke lngels, Chinese architect Ma Yansong, and Korean architect Cho Minsuk. Jeffrey Inaba, who is the founder of the architectural firm INABA, located in Los Angeles, USA takes part in this art show as a co-curator-cum-architect. Bjarke Ingels and Ma Yansong are the founders of BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) in Copenhagen and Mad in Beijing respectively. Cho Minsuk is the principal of Mass Studies, an architectural firm in Seoul.

These four architects – all leaders of the architectural world have gained worldwide attention. They present four architectural suggestions for Ansan, where the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art is located. This art show will be an epoch-making event to raise new topics for not only architecture but also art in general.

As indicated by its title, their four propositions are site-specific, based on the museum’s location, place, and space. The participating architects all take their work’s motifs from the historical, cultural, and topological features of Ansan. Their projects presented for the exhibition are artistic objects themselves and turn to usable furniture such as table and chairs freassembledor reinstalled, transforming the Museum lobby into as treet café. The museum lobby, to be newly produced through the exhibition, comes to have a multi-functional feature as an open exhibit venue, a new fountain of information, and a comfortable resting place. Viewers may discover inherent functions of displayed works by rearranging and exploiting them, marveling at architectural objects that touch the boundaries between art and everyday life.

Their proposals are completed through the participation of Ansan citizens, Gyeonggi residents, and viewers from home and abroad. In this respect, this architectural show can be seen as a proposal to globalize locality. I am deeply grateful to these four architects for their attempts to break down the lines between art and everyday life, the world and a region. At the same time, pay homage to their aesthetic will and creative desire to redefine and expand the concept and sphere of communicable art and engagement art in the name of architecture, also thank the staff from each architectural office forgiving their unsparing support, as well as those who made efforts to install the works at the exhibit venue.