DigiFunArt Festival 2015 at The Seoul Museum of Art – Introduction

Many of you will be aware that I was invited to lecture at the Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea on 23 September 2015.  It was a huge honour for me to be invited by DigiFun Art to participate in the DigiFun Art: Urban Scape Mobile Photography & Art Exhibition and Festival at this most prestigious museum.  

Seoul Museum of Art is the representative art museum of Seoul, the capital of Korea and a central city of Asia, that aims to be a ‘Beautiful, Good, and Smart Art Museum.’ In order to accomplish this goal, the museum has set up two major objectives: to become a world-renowned art museum and to be a museum for the city and its people. Under such objectives, the museum is making great efforts to expand and promote itself as a place for culture and the arts as well as a space for meaningful social education. Through a variety of exhibitions and educational programs that reflect a cosmopolitan sense, regional characteristics, professionalism, and popularity, the museum hopes to reach its goals.

This exhibition titled ≪DigiFun Art: Urban Scape≫ aims to show how mobile devices and their various applications, which have become more than essential to us, also serve as a new artistic tool for artists; as well as to shed light on creative activities in new fields that have emerged through the various functions of smart devices.

The term ‘DigiFun’ in the title of the exhibition is a compound word made from ‘digital’ and ‘fun.’ Just as the contemporary British artist David Hockney has been creating and presenting a series of iPad drawings since 2009, portable mobile gadgets allow people to engage in creative activities without being limited by place or conventional tools such as brushes or water colours, and fulfil the basic need for novelty and pleasure.

The Opening Ceremony took place on 22 September 2015 and the exhibition runs to 13 December 2015. Please do visit, if you can.

Other artists participating in the Digifun Art Mobile Art Exhibition & Festival include Susan Murtaugh, Jeremy Sutton, Hong Seung-Hye, Hong Kyoungtack, Kim Yong-chul, Kim Yong-kwan, Park Gwang-soo, Lee Fi, Jörg Hinz, Ahn Seung-joon and Hong-kyu Kim.  I also personally asked to include art by Sarah Jarrett, Mimi Svanberg, Jun Yamaguchi, Janine Graf, Roger Guetta and Carolyn Hall Young – their works including my own are displayed on a digital screen within the exhibition.  

Huge thanks go to Professor Ahn, Amy Chung and Sangwoo Kang of DigiFun Art and also to Ara Jo  Seung-Eun Una Lee and all their colleagues at the Seoul Museum of Art for organising and inviting me to lecture at this spellbinding mobile art festival.

Photos included here were taking by various people including Ara Jo and Sangwoo Kang.

Yesterday, I published the main Flickr Group Showcase that I showed during my lecture, if you missed that, please go here. In my next post, I will publish the first part of my lecture.