Hoam Museum turns itself upside down for latest Art Spectrum show

YONGIN, Gyeonggi Provinde — A giant mural with a black-and-white illustration now blocks the stately front view of the Hoam Museum of Art’s lobby. Outside, enormous cartoon-like images climb its stone façade, while graffiti, colorful T-shirts and caps by subculture artists greet visitors inside.

For an institution long associated with celadon, Joseon-era paintings and the refined beauty of its traditional Heewon garden, the transformation is deliberate.

“We wanted to break the authority of Hoam,” Kwak June-young, head of modern and contemporary art department II at Leeum Museum of Art and Hoam Museum of Art, said during a press tour Monday. The curators sought to disrupt the building’s imposing symmetry and create a different experience from the moment visitors arrive, she said.

The result is “ARoomWhereEveryRadioIsTurnedIntoDifferentStations,” the latest edition of the institution’s years-long Art Spectrum series, running through Dec. 27 at Hoam in Yongin. It is the first Art Spectrum exhibition staged at Hoam and was co-curated with Hugo Vitrani of Paris’ Palais de Tokyo.

Launched by Leeum in 2001 as a platform for emerging Korean artists, Art Spectrum expanded in 2024 to include artists from across Asia. This year, it features 23 participating artists and collectives’ works across visual art, film, performance, architecture, design, fashion and music.

The exhibition’s cryptic title imagines exactly what it says: a room full of radio sounds tuned to different stations. Rather than binding “Asia” into a single identity or theme, curators bring together voices shaped by distinct histories, cultures and social realities.

Hoam itself has become part of that experiment. Of the exhibition’s 63 works, 26 are newly commissioned projects made in response to the museum’s particular spatial conditions. The show extends beyond the galleries to the parking lot, garden, café grounds and the museum’s exterior walls, allowing contemporary art to wash over the institution and its tranquil natural setting.

That unruly energy begins at the entrance.

The Korean collective, dpgp78, consisting of Min Sung-sig and Kim Ji-hwan, has covered the museum’s front-facing interior wall with a sprawling mural. Its visual image is playful and disorienting, with a cat, fragmented scenes with chains and an electric chair – literally blocking the conventional view into the museum.

Min said the duo wanted to “occupy” and “win” against the institutional gravity of the space.

Beyond the lobby, Japanese collective SIDE CORE’s four-channel video installation shows skateboarders speeding through Tokyo’s vast underground infrastructure. Their movements and the abrasive sound of skateboard wheels scraping against wet floors create an uneasy tension, pulling viewers away from Hoam’s serene setting.

The exhibition’s playful, unruly exterior gives way to weightier questions inside.

Chinese artist Ruofan Chen’s “Suffocating” suspends a large, house-like structure at a precarious angle, looking as if it could collapse at any moment. The work began with the artist’s experience at a furniture factory in Wuhan, where she observed carpenters and others working in poorly ventilated conditions, inhaling dust generated during construction.

Vietnamese artist Lena Bui, meanwhile, creates a quiet, poetic landscape using stump rubbings to record stumps of Senegal mahogany trees cut down during urban development of Ho Chi Minh City. The trees, introduced from West Africa to Vietnam during French colonial rule, had become a familiar part of the city’s landscape for over a century.

Elsewhere, Indonesian artist Elia Nurvista examines palm oil, a commodity bound up with Indonesia’s colonial history, labor conditions and environmental conflicts in a multimedia installation titled “Plantation Tragedy,” where a palm tree, a scientist and artificial intelligence have fictional conversations about the industry’s contested future.

The museum’s grounds have also become part of the exhibition.

Rachel Youn’s rotating artificial palm tree, “Parade Paradis II,” stands among Hoam’s real pines. Near the café, Aerin Hong’s “Music Siren” transforms the wing movements of two motorized toy butterflies into piano harmonies, while Japanese architect Suzuko Yamada’s “Hanging Moon,” a 8-meter-wide hemispherical canopy, appears above the garden path beyond Louise Bourgeois’ black spider.

The exhibition runs through Dec. 27 at Hoam Museum of Art.