From Seoul to Switzerland’s Southern Alps: Korean video artwork in movement

5 hundred hours of recent footage are uploaded to YouTube each sixty seconds. And that is only one website. Characteristic-length films launched in cinemas have been filmed solely on iPhones. Onboarding at a brand new agency would possibly see you watching introductory movies about firm tradition. Graphic designers are anticipated to have upskilled in movement design and be proficient. Briefly, the whole lot is in flux. Nothing is staying nonetheless. Motion is vital.

In February 2026, the 174-year-old Victoria and Albert Museum acquired the first-ever YouTube clip for its everlasting assortment. This feat was barely extra complicated than that sentence suggests, with the V&A working with the video website to reconstruct the 2005 watch web page, because the related on-line archives solely return to 2006. The rationale this brief clip of co-founder Jawed Karim casually on the zoo was so necessary to the museum isn’t any totally different from that of many different prized bodily objects. The clip represents the primary minute of a brand new world, a before-and-after second in fashionable society and our ubiquitous capturing and sharing of video content material.

South Korea, as we all know or think about it in the present day, is a younger nation, with democracy not but forty years outdated. Unsurprisingly, with the widespread manufacturing of digital items within the East Asian industrial hubs of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China, producing video gear alongside the nation’s newfound freedoms has led to widespread enthusiasm for the {hardware}. In some ways, they’re main the best way, tackling various issues stemming from collective reminiscence, mass migration, and difficult custom, the gig financial system and up to date worklife, in addition to extra existential curiosity within the physique and expertise.

The invitation to South Korean curator Je Yun Moon to work with Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana (MASI Lugano) got here from the establishment’s Francesca Benini. Among the many first issues to sort out was scale back a big, sprawling, not essentially related group of filmmakers to a manageable measurement whereas nonetheless representing a broad vary of what the nation was creating. An early choice was to not embrace the one identify that could be extra acquainted to Western gallery goers, the godfather of Korean video artwork, Nam June Paik. Whereas blue-chip mega-gallery Gagosian represents his property, and his work may be discovered on the Tate Fashionable and the Pompidou, for this exhibition, all the chosen artists are nonetheless alive and dealing.

One of many subsequent points was what to name the exhibition. Ok-NOW! is unapologetically reductive – it diminishes the complexity and a number of layers of a rustic and its folks. It is usually of the second and unarguably inclusive. The shorthand of the letter Ok and the immediacy of the phrase now do effectively to encapsulate the work on show. It ought to encourage a wider demographic to attend the present, extra conversant in KPop, Demon Hunters, BTS, and BLACKPINK.

An extra set of parameters to work with was the location itself. MASI Lugano strikingly sits on the shore of the glacial Lake Lugano, an exquisite and well-heeled space of southern Switzerland bordering Italy. Whereas the gallery constructing is barely a decade outdated, the floor-to-ceiling shiny viewing home windows are hardly conducive to showcasing video artwork. As such, it is the basement degree that hosts the majority of the present, with a last work introduced within the ground-floor lobby.

Bookended by black curtained screening areas, the exhibition begins and ends in a extra typical show format. Initially, you stroll into Chan-kyong Park’s Citizen’s Forest. It is the longest (26 minutes), oldest (2016) and widest (three parallel and concurrent overhead video projectors) piece within the exhibition. Set at a languid tempo and introduced in black and white, the movie touches upon shamanism and hints at historic occasions. As a viewer, you frequently scan backwards and forwards trancelike over the forest panorama and its unusual costumed inhabitants.

On the finish of the exhibition, Jane Jin Kaisen’s Providing, 2023 and Wrerckage, 2024 are screened collectively, at a proper angle. These are extra overtly troubling, with their references to drowning and real-life massacres – underwater footage partially, acquainted to the slow-motion footage of Invoice Viola. There are echoes and responses to many Western artists and filmmakers inside the present. As you would possibly anticipate, artwork isn’t made in a vacuum. A lot of the content material suggests different creatives or is analogous in execution, simply as these items will, in flip, encourage others.

Humour is employed by Onejoon Che and Nigerian musician Igwe Osinachi. It’s in all probability little recognized exterior the respective communities, however there was important African emigration to Korea in the course of the 2000s, pushed by vitality and academic exchanges. The music video Made in Korea, 2021, seems to be at this diaspora with a smile on its face and a shared rhythm heard by means of the hanging headphones beneath the display screen.

A second wall-mounted plasma display screen incorporates a show of the exaggerated social-climbing promotion of the fictional streaming character Cherry Jang, a Gisaeng-like creation of artist Sungsil Ryu. There’s even a chance to develop into a ‘top quality citizen’ on-line for these not planning a visit to the museum. The satire is sharp and compelling, and the video’s run time is transient sufficient to maintain you enthralled and wanting extra.

The collective 업체eobchae (Nahee Kim, Cheonseok Oh and Hwi Hwang) presents one thing altogether totally different with ROLA ROLLS, 2024. It’s a nightmarish narrative swerving from a blurred out and suggestive therapeutic massage desk scene to an automotive-human hybrid operation, full with an agonised affected person soundtrack. The physique horror is displayed by means of a separate geometric sculpture, with AI-generated temper boards depicting disfigurement and mutation. It is extra excessive than Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or-winning Titane, and viewer discretion is suggested.

Heecheon Kim employs digital actuality within the 2021 work Ghost1990. It is an unsure piece, and as with a lot of his work, may be thought of each dystopian and utopian in its attain. The participant inhabits a digital fitness center surroundings fairly than viewing it. Nonetheless, the artist is much less prescriptive about how his movies ought to be learn than thinking about posing extra questions on actuality and the way we expertise it, not least on this age of mass-recordings and infinite streaming.

Probably the most visually arresting work follows a fast-food supply driver by means of the Michael Mann-like nocturnal cityscapes of Seoul, solely to take interdimensional shortcuts and meet her doppelganger amid a spectrum of neons and LEDs. Ayoung Kim’s Supply Dancer’s Sphere, 2022, is a single-channel video set up, arrange centrally and wall-sized within the exhibition’s open space.

The artist has spoken of cinema retaining too many guidelines, and that displaying the work as video within the context of a gallery makes it extra readily accepted. Her experimentalism streaks throughout the display screen, together with her speculative fiction, that’s science fiction anchored in actuality, impressed by the isolation of Covid lockdowns and the reliance on app-based supply providers. She mused about these still-mobile, unknown carriers at a time when so many people had been stationary.

Lastly, on the bottom ground, particularly meant for a public area, Sojung Jun presents Inexperienced Display screen, 2021. The massive-scale, lush forest scene depicted is definitely the demilitarised zone between South and North Korea. An space devoid of human exercise or Chilly Struggle intervention has since develop into an ecological website of nice range. The movie’s purposeful glitches trace at one thing not fairly proper with the setting. The placement is part of historical past nonetheless being lived out, unresolved to this present day.

Video is a loaded and dated time period. Lengthy-lost reminiscences of hiring tapes from Blockbuster are nothing greater than nostalgia for Era X. Shifting photos are inexorable from who all of us are, what we do, and the way we eat. Even the essential promoting billboard or bus cease poster, unchanged for thus lengthy, is now a revolving sequence of animated messages. Paradoxically, this snapshot of Korean video artwork is a tantalising style of a a lot wider, expansive use of movie and transferring picture.