What happens when art refuses to be timeless?

In "Absorption" by Asad Raza, a field of soil covers the gallery's floor at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul. Its musky earth is mixed with urban detritus gathered across the capital, including coffee grounds, chicken bones and ginkgo nuts. Yonhap

What happens when art refuses to obey its most basic promise: to endure?

At the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Seoul, an exhibition turns that question inside out, finding poetry not in permanence but in decay. It comes with a rather evocative title, “Sak-da: The Poetics of Decomposition.”

“Sak-da” is a layered Korean verb. Depending on context, it can mean “to rot” or “to lose vitality.” But it can also describe fermentation, a process which does not destroy, but transforms, producing new flavors and aromas. That dual meaning runs through the show, binding together more than 50 works by 15 artists and collectives.

The materials here are restless. They rot, dry out, sprout and gather mold. Sometimes, they fall apart entirely — conditions museums typically try very hard to prevent.

Traditionally, the museum has cast itself as a guardian of the timeless: a place that preserves objects in their most ideal conditions, so they may be passed down intact to future generations.

“Sak-da” deliberately pushes against that mandate. Here, decay is not a flaw to be corrected but the work’s very engine. The show thus asks a provocative question: Are museums — and we as viewers — prepared to embrace art that is meant to disappear? And does our long-held belief that a “great” artwork must remain unchanged still hold in an age defined by instability and flux?

Edgar Calel's "The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge" / Yonhap

Curator Lee Joo-yeon noted that introducing such practices into museum spaces has long posed an institutional challenge.

“Museums have functioned as repositories committed to preserving works permanently and ensuring their continued existence. When works that actively embrace decay enter that space, they inevitably test those boundaries,” she said.

“The conservation team, for instance, would ask: What happens if mold develops? Could it endanger other works in the collection? How do you conduct daily condition checks on pieces that are constantly changing with time and environment? Those were very real, practical concerns. Watching those debates unfold, I found that tension itself fascinating.”

Lee added that a broader contradiction is also at play. While many contemporary institutions position themselves as environmentally conscious platforms, foregrounding sustainability as part of their agendas, works that genuinely commit to ecological process — allowing organic matter to enter and grow — can suddenly prove difficult to accommodate within their tightly controlled environment.

The exhibition thus connects to a much bigger reckoning in contemporary art: a sustained challenge to anthropocentric thinking. It unsettles the assumption that humans sit at the center of all meaning, with everything else arranged for our purposes and governed by out desire for stability.

Dan Lie's "Witnesses/Testigues" / Yonhap

In “Sak-da,” artists step back from the role of a sole, all-powerful creator. What emerges instead is collaboration with nonhuman forces like soil, grass, mold, microorganisms and fire. These works don’t try to separate themselves from the rest of the world; they move within it, subject to the same cycles of growth, erosion and renewal.

One of the first sights greeting visitors is a gallery floor that is no longer a floor at all, but a field of soil. This is “Absorption” by American artist Asad Raza.

The dark, musky earth is mixed with coffee grounds, chicken bones, pine needles, ginkgo nuts, discarded delivery boxes, scraps of electrical wiring and crumbs of fried food — urban detritus gathered from across Seoul. Added into what the artist calls fertile “neosoil,” these remnants begin to interact with microorganisms underground, transforming into something new.

The field is actively tended throughout the exhibition by a team of cultivators who monitor its shifting conditions. Visitors are invited to scoop a handful of soil into small pouches provided by the museum, carrying a piece of it beyond the gallery walls.

Gosari's "Grass Man"/ Courtesy of MMCA

Korean artist Gosari offers a gentler but equally resonant gesture. Using grass weeded from the museum’s own gardens, she has created “Grass Man,” a humanlike figure conjured from nameless plants. There’s something playful about the encounter, recalling the simple joy of making a snowman as a child that is supposed to be temporary and made to melt away.

For “Timber and Fire,” Kim Bang-joo turns his gaze to the institution itself. He stacks timber discarded and salvaged from previous shows. Some of it is burned as firewood at his home and the resulting ash is then returned to the gallery and piled alongside what remains.

It draws attention to a reality rarely acknowledged: the immense amount of waste generated by exhibitions, in the form of temporary walls and display structures built only to be torn down again months later. Kim transforms that overlooked byproduct into the very substance of art.

There is also a personal undercurrent. Following his father’s illness, Kim began reflecting on life and death not as opposites, but as intertwined states. By placing timber and its afterlife side by side, he points to an uneasy truth — that life already contains within it its own ending.

Yo Daham's "Moving Smoke" / Newsis

Another work that lingers is by Yo Daham, who presents a series of crochet incense burners titled “Timber and Fire.” Since 2019, he has been knitting these vessels not merely to hold incense, but to create a stage for smoke to rise and dissolve into air.

A beautiful contradiction animates the series. Each object is painstakingly made, thread by thread, with the full knowledge that it will eventually be consumed by flame. They are delicate, time-consuming works created in service of their own disappearance.

Elsewhere, decay takes on many forms, from the chemical to the ritualistic and sacred.

Lee Eun-jae’s “Now Polish the Corners of Geundae” is painted with egg yolk, a material that dries, dulls and eventually spoils. What begins as a yellow, glowing surface gradually loses its sheen as the pigment succumbs to time.

Lee Eun-jae's luminously yellow "Now Polish the Corners of Geundae" / Yonhap

In “Decomposition” Yuko Mohri, who represented the Japan Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, harnesses energy generated by rotting fruit to poduce light and sound. As the fruit ferments, it powers the installation, turning breakdown into electricity and vibration.

The work is intriguingly juxtaposed with “Kusozu,” a genre of Japanese Buddhist painting that depicts a female corpse decomposing through nine stages. Historically used as a meditation tool, such images invited practitioners to contemplate the body’s inevitable dissolution as a way of purging sensual desire. Set side by side, Mohri’s installation and these paintings frame decomposition as biological and spritual transformation.

And in Edgar Calel’s “The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge,” fruits like pineapples, bananas, watermelons, oranges and pomegranates are carefully placed on top of stones as offerings to the ancestors of the Maya-Kaqchikel artist.

The installation is notable for marking a rare institutional shift when Tate decided to not “acquire” the piece in a conventional sense, but enter into custodianship. Recognizing that Calel’s piece is not an object to be owned or traded, the museum adopted a model that supports the ritual required to activate it and acknowledges the community whose participation completes it. In doing so, the institution allows the work to remain what it is: a living offering rather than a collectible artifact.

“Sak-da: The Poetics of Decomposition” runs through May 3 at MMCA Seoul.