Nanji Art Studio 20th Anniversary Exhibition: 《The Origin of Love》

Technology is no longer a tool existing outside of life, but has become an environment that conditions our senses and relationships. We wake up to smartphone alarms, move along paths indicated by satellites, and spend our days encountering news curated by algorithms. Within this, the ways we remember and relate to one another are also changing.

The act of staying by someone's side, and the forms of caring and leaning on one another, are being newly shaped within this environment. In the midst of this, the question we find ourselves contemplating is: where does the power that keeps people by each other's side originate, even amidst a changing landscape?

The exhibition "The Origin of Love: AMOR EX MACHINA," commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Seoul Museum of Art's Nanji Art Creation Studio, places the word "love" back into this conversation. "The Origin of Love" is a journey to find the root of humanity that remains undamaged even in the face of a massive technological civilization, suggesting that the destination to which we must ultimately return is love.

Simultaneously, "Amor Ex Machina (Love from the Machine)" is a variation of the classical dramatic concept "Deus Ex Machina (God from the Machine)." In today's world, constructed through technology and mechanical devices rather than the artificial intervention of a transcendental being, it signifies that the fundamental foundation capable of saving us is, ultimately, love.

The act of beings who cannot fully understand one another nevertheless approaching, caring for, and leaning on each other, while embracing the possibility of being hurt. Compassion, care, interdependence, and connection are the methods that imperfect beings have long learned in order to stay by each other's side. In an era where technology rewrites the forms of relationships, love emerges not as a distant concept, but as a concrete condition that sustains life.

The exhibition retraces this condition within the archetypes of stories. The wonder and price paid by the one who stole fire, the loss and transformation of the one who entrusted memories to a river, and the struggle of the one who returned in a strange form unfold upon today's scenes. The body changes as it meshes with technology, memories are transferred into data, and those standing outside the system endure the world through their own senses.

Stories passed down from long ago do not remain in the past. This is because they serve as a frame reflecting the present while allowing us to gauge the time that has not yet arrived.

Here, old stories become the language of the present. The artists participating in this exhibition have passed through the Nanji Art Creation Studio over the last twenty years. Their works contain layers of the technological environment and sensory changes of their time. The time they spent depicting the scenes of technology altering the body, perception, and shapes of connection in their own language was also a process of re-establishing senses and learning ways to coexist with others within a changing world.

What "The Origin of Love" looks at is the sense that still makes us human even after passing through more sophisticated devices and denser systems. When old stories, contemporary landscapes, and works that have traversed the time of Nanji are placed together, love approaches as a force operating here and now. Instead of presenting love in a single, uniform shape, the exhibition allows us to grope our way forward with our own steps, much like an ancient journey that repeats similar narratives yet arrives at a different place every time.

Source: Seoul Museum of Art website