Cho Duck Hyun, The Garden of Sounds-Balance in Balance, 2020 © Cho Duck Hyun

The combination or fusion of “art” and “technology” has already been a major concern and subject of discussion since the early twentieth century. In recent years, as technology and IT have been introduced and disseminated on a comprehensive scale, the form of “art” has been changing more rapidly than ever before, raising more fundamental questions about its concept and identity.

Since the modern era, art has pursued its own autonomy as a human activity that takes beauty as its norm or purpose, separating itself from rational activities grounded in scientific thinking and mechanical logic. Following the Industrial Revolution, which accompanied rapid social transformation, artists at times even expressed hostility toward technology as a tool.

Yet, as seen in movements such as Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Purism, and the Bauhaus, a group of modernist avant-gardes regarded technology and scientific rationality as the source and ideology of art. By discovering aesthetic and spiritual values within them, they sought to realize a more ideal world.

From the latter half of the twentieth century onward, the actively explored convergence of art and technology led to an expansion in both the form and content of art. Moreover, the development of computers, electronic devices, IT technologies, and the basic sciences—including biology and chemistry—has accelerated both the breadth and depth of this expansion.

The Contemporary Art Museum is both a site where these changing aspects of art can be concretely observed and, as in the past, a place where visitors encounter art directly. Accordingly, it faces the urgent and challenging task of understanding and diagnosing the meaning of these unprecedented transformations in art while helping audiences accept and comprehend this situation.

As a museum dedicated to contemporary art, the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art seeks to examine and share with its audiences the numerous ways in which art adopts and integrates technology across different levels and orientations. This exhibition focuses on “technology,” one of the key issues confronting contemporary art in Korea today.

In particular, it addresses so-called Low Technology, examining recent works based on mechanical mechanisms. Through these works, the exhibition considers the broader perceptions artists hold regarding “technology” and “art,” and explores the meanings embodied in the works themselves from an aesthetic perspective.

Accordingly, the exhibition focuses less on the “dramatic” or “narrative” aspects produced by the convergence of art and technology, and instead pays attention to artworks as aesthetic entities. In other words, it seeks to examine how the artist’s artistic ideas are successfully reinforced and materialized through this conjunction, and how the application of new technologies leads art into new phases in which it can redefine itself. Through this process, the exhibition aims to organize, as far as possible, the various perspectives on art and technology revealed in the diverse experiments of artists, and to draw out implications for contemporary art as a whole.

As suggested by the exhibition title, attention is also directed toward the ways in which “technology” and “art”—terms that were derived and separated from the ancient concepts of technē and ars, which once defined and designated a broad category of human activity—are now being conceptually “restored” or “returned” to one another. This perspective may offer a way to interpret and understand the current condition of art from a more fundamental point than simply viewing it as the combination of two separate categories: technology and art.

Although a single exhibition cannot encompass the broad and diverse ideas and works of numerous artists, it is hoped that this exhibition will serve as one of many perspectives and reflections on art, artworks, and artists, and ultimately become an attempt to foster deeper research into contemporary Korean art.

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