Exhibition view of DMA Collection Highlights 2024, Daejeon Museum of Art
©팔사진관, 대전시립미술관 제공
DMA Collection Highlights 2024
Since its foundation in 1998, the Daejeon Museum of Art (DMA) has acquired outstanding modern and contemporary artworks for its permanent collection. DMA collection of about 1,400 artworks embraces almost all the genres of art (painting, sculpture, drawing, photograph, craft, new media, and so on) and is currently evolving itself to accept a wider range of art genres.
The collection of museums is a public asset representing the art culture of the time. Recently, it is being newly interpreted from the perspective of cultural mechanism focusing on producing meaning and value. As the collections of museums belong to all people, they must be able to access and enjoy them anytime, but the artworks they can see are a small fraction of their collections. In this changed cultural context, the DMA Open Storage was established to be accessible to the public. After a preparatory period of five years, the DMA opened the Open Storage as the first public museum to initiate such efforts in Korea. Unlike the general museum storages that are inaccessible to the general public, the new concept of open storage is to provide the public with possibilities to engage with and appreciate the collection of the museum. This new attempt demonstrates the function and form of storage facilities that accommodate artworks safely and, at the same time, allow viewers to walk within the place and see the stored artworks closely. The artworks in the Open Storage deserve to be appreciated and interpreted beyond a certain theme curated by the museum.
DMA Collection Highlights 2024 introduces 38 artworks representing the collection of the DMA. Unlike earlier ones featuring works in all kinds of art genres, this exhibition is composed of two dimensional artworks (paintings and photographs). The art racks standing against the three walls and the artworks densely hung on them in the Open Storage will provide viewers with a new experience of an exhibition space full of artworks. In the exhibition, viewers will be able to confirm various aspects of the DMA collection through works made from the modern era (Work (1968) by YOO Youngkuk, Landscapes (1983) by JANG Wookjin, Day87- 5, 87-6 (1987) by RYU Kyungchai) to works by up-and-coming artists (Bias (2022) by KANG Cheolgyu, An Unfinished Staircase (2023) by LEE Deokyoung, and Survival Check (2021) by JANG Dongwook).
(Korean below)