“No Ghost Just a Shell” Installation view ©SeMA
The Buk-Seoul Museum of Art presents “No Ghost Just a Shell” featuring the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, on view through August 4.
This exhibition, which reconstructs “No Ghost Just a Shell,” centering on works from the Van Abbemuseum’s collection, presents 23 works by 14 artists. Initiated in 1999 by French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, “No Ghost Just a Shell” was a multimedia, multi-author project in which more than 20 artists created more than 30 works based on a single character, ‘Annlee,’ until 2002, when the Van Abbemuseum acquired the entire collection.
The protagonist, Annlee, was originally a one-off character purchased inexpensively from a Japanese animation company, and Huyghe and Parreno provided the image for the various artists to use and gave her a new identity in their own way. In the hands of these artists, her life evolved.
The exhibition is a fascinating discussion about the culture of copying and reproduction and new forms of artistic creation in the post-digital age. In this regard, issues such as copyright, personality rights, and distribution rights, the need for institutional openness and change in museums, and the concept of identity and subjectivity from an ethical perspective to animals, objects, and even artificial intelligence are explored.
