InterviewNo photos, no objects: Tino Sehgal's art exists only when you're there

Artist Tino Sehgal / Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art

As an arts reporter, you learn to live with a certain inadequacy: Whatever words you lay down on the page will never equal the impact of encountering the work itself.

In the end, every review bends toward the same conclusion — you, dear reader, simply have to go and see it for yourself.

Still, you can attempt a translation. You can describe the atmosphere and the scale. You can single out details, place them in context and include photographs that give readers something tangible to hold onto. At the very least, you can offer an echo of the experience persuasive enough to make them step outside and walk into the museum.

With Tino Sehgal, even that modest consolation falls away.

There are no images to describe. No objects to analyze. No installation shots to accompany a paragraph. His craft emerges instead in the immaterial space between strangers, through voices and choreographies that materialize from thin air and dissolve just as quickly.

So this may be the rare instance in which a review must confess its own futility from the start. For Sehgal’s art, there can be no descriptive surrogate. Whether you end up hating it or loving it, you really do have to be there. And with that shortcoming acknowledged, the article can finally begin.

Auguste Rodin's "The Burghers of Calais" stands beside a flower sculpture by Jeff Koons, part of the display arranged according to Tino Sehgal's curatorial concept. Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art

It is at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul that Sehgal brings eight of his works, or what he prefers to call “constructed situations.”

That phrasing is deliberate. The artist has long resisted the language of performance, which implies a fixed theatrical event with a clear beginning and an end. His living works exist only when activated by people, unfolding within the museum space he describes as a “liberal, individualized ritual.”

The works leave behind almost no physical residue: no objects, no photographs and no catalogue documentation. Even the commercial acquisition of his pieces is conducted entirely through oral agreements.

Each situation, like “Kiss” and “This is So Contemporary,” is presented through a group of trained participants whom he refers to as “interpreters”: dancers, musicians and performers who animate the scene through movement, speech and interaction with visitors.

“I think of it as a sculptural play between humans,” he said during an interview with The Korea Times. “It’s different to do a show with 70 people and a show with 70 sculptures.”

Yet the pieces are not improvised happenings. Every situation — whether a kissing couple or museum guards singing in unison — follows a structure, sometimes tightly choreographed down to the smallest gesture, sometimes closer to an open-ended game.

If you encounter the freestyle footballer in “This Entry” — and trust me, you do not need much explanation for their presence next to a bicycle and a violin — roughly half of what they do is precisely scripted, down to how they move their head. The other half is improvised.

“Some parts are completely choreographed, and other parts work like a game,” the artist said. “The rules are there, but within those rules, people make their own choices.”

Meanwhile, some of the most subtle situations occur outside the gallery spaces. His latest untitled piece appears quietly in the museum lobby, where interpreters mingle almost indistinguishably among visitors.

The ambiguity can be disorienting. But for those willing to linger, that uncertainty becomes part of the reward: the slow realization that the artwork may already be revealing around them.

“I was interested in doing something in the lobby that was porous,” Sehgal said. “The lobby is a place where people spend time and hang out. I didn’t want to disrupt that too much.”

For a creator whose oeuvre relies entirely on physical human presence, Sehgal has watched the broader cultural environment shift dramatically over the past two decades. When he began developing these situations around the year 2000, the central question concerned the absence of objects.

“At the beginning it was more about: What does it mean that there is no object?” he said.

Today, a different question emerges. “Now it’s about: What does it mean that there is no screen?”

Sehgal’s works famously prohibit all forms of recording: no photographs, no video, no wall labels. For many of Korea’s Instagram-loving museumgoers, that rule may sound like torture — a striking reversal in a culture where photographing exhibitions has become second nature.

Visitors enter a gallery at the Leeum Museum of Art, where one of Tino Sehgal's situations unfolds. Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art

For him, however, the decision to eliminate documentation and material objects was never about “protecting” anything. Rather, he calls it a real-life experiment.

“When I started, there was this belief that something is only real if it is material and documented,” he said. “So I thought: What happens if we remove that parameter?”

In his view, a constructed situation represents a different model of production: one based on the transformation of human action rather than the consumption of physical materials. “My works are commodities,” he noted. “But they are immaterial commodities.”

“And here we are, 25 years later, and you’re still talking to me. So apparently it works.”

The result, he suggests, reveals something fundamental about how knowledge and experience circulate among people. Much of what humans learn has historically been transmitted directly from person to person rather than through written records.

“If you teach a 5-year-old a game like baseball, do you give them a book and ask them to read the rules? No, you go out and start playing.”

The absence of documentation did not slow his career. If anything, it accelerated it. Within a few years of beginning his practice, Sehgal was invited to represent Germany at the 2005 Venice Biennale. He later received the Golden Lion for best artist in 2013.

Still, he is quick to place his work within a longer lineage. Scholars familiar with the experiments of conceptual and minimal art in the 1960s and ‘70s can easily recognize the questions he is extending. Artists of that era had already explored the dematerialization of the artwork, shifting attention away from the physical object toward ideas, processes and systems.

“In that sense, it was not completely new,” he said. “It continued certain unresolved questions, but perhaps in a slightly different way.”

Despite their immaterial form, Sehgal’s works are not immune to disappearance. Without tangible objects, their survival depends on memory and transmission.

“My work can’t really be destroyed, but it can be forgotten,” he noted.

If the knowledge of how to perform the works were no longer passed on, and if no one remained interested in maintaining them, they could simply fade from existence.

Yet this vulnerability, he stresses, is true of all art.

“At the end of the day, an artwork is an idea that gets manifested. Even a Mondrian could disappear if, in 500 years, people decide it’s not important or simply don’t care about art,” he said.

For now, Sehgal has put systems in place to keep the works alive. A studio team helps transmit the pieces to museums and new generations of interpreters, much as choreographic trusts preserve the works of major dance figures. He often cites the example of the choreographer George Balanchine, whose ballets continue to be staged worldwide by dancers who never met him.

“That’s the interesting question,” he said. “How long something continues.”

Sehgal's constructed situation, "Instead of allowing something to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things," is presented alongside more than 30 sculptures from the Leeum's collection, including works by Gwon O-sang, Alberto Giacometti and Antony Gormley. Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art

It has been 25 years since Sehgal first unleashed his “situations” into museums. After a quarter century of watching them unfold, shaped anew by interpreters and audiences in cities around the world, does his attachment to them remain the same?

“I’ve been doing this for a long time, and not many people do this for such a long time,” he said. “So sometimes it feels a little bit like a marriage — a successful one.”

Like any long union, the artist admits, there are moments of annoyance.

“It’s a bit like, ‘I love you, but it’s been going on for a long time,’” he added with a chuckle. “Still talking about oral contracts, no documentation. It’s something I decided when I was 25; now I’m twice that age, and I’m still talking about it.”

Time, however, has shifted his relationship to the work. At 25, it was difficult to maintain distance from what he was making. Now, decades later, that distance arrives through the ways audiences receive it.

“For me, reception is not an abstract thing,” he said. “As artists, we create prisms and then you come and shoot your light through them. Your light might be green. It might be blue. I don’t know exactly which colors will come out on the other side, because I don’t know your personality or your perspective.”

What emerges is shaped not by you standing before the work, as with a painting or sculpture, but by stepping into the moment that becomes the art itself.

And that is the final condition of a Sehgal piece: the prism is there, waiting. The light is yours to bring.

“Tino Sehgal” runs through June 28 at the Leeum Museum of Art.