The Photographic Arts Center, a branch of the Seoul Museum of Art and the first public art museum specializing in photography in Korea, is under construction with the goal of opening in 2024. The purpose is to establish a balanced Korean photographic history, flexibly respond to the rapidly changing characteristics of photographic media, and encompass expertise, popularity, internationality, and locality.
Before its inauguration, through a pre-opening program every year, the Photographic Arts Center, SeMA, shares the development and construction process and asks questions about the role and function of the museum. Furthermore, it explores the possibility of harmoniously connecting the region-medium-topological peculiarity of the Korea-photography-art museum. 2022 Photographic Arts Center, Seoul Museum of Art Pre-opening Program - The Printed World introduces the main collections of the Photographic Arts Center (the 1950s to the 1980s) and contemporary artworks (the 2010s to the 2020s.) Let's listen to the voices of photographers who have used their photos as a medium between the past and the present.
The Printed World began with several questions raised during the artwork-collecting process. Fixing is a photo phenomenon. It is a technical term referring to the photochemical stage of settling an image onto support during the printing process. Printed World expands the meaning of ‘printed’ to fixing, a word that refers to the process in which the artist’s experiences and perceptions are imaged. This three-part pre-opening program focuses on the diversity and heterogeneity of photographic media caused by changes in technology and media environment from analog to digital. The hope is that this will serve as an opportunity to think about the meaning and role of photography recontextualized in the 'history of Korean photography' and 'Art Museum.’