The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA, Director Youn Bummo) presents PROJECT HASHTAG 2021, an open call project aimed at discovering promising next-generation artists who can lead the art scene while supporting collaborations across diverse disciplines, from 3 November 2021 to 6 February 2022, at MMCA Seoul.
PROJECT HASHTAG, a project in partnership with Hyundai Motor Company entails the museum's vision of mustering wisdom with the young generation to see new attitudes and methods in preparing for art in the future. Moving beyond the conventional form of visuality or linear time-oriented art, the project supports all experimenting platforms of curating and exhibiting art as well as collaborations among young creators from diverse disciplines. The project is named after "hashtag (#)," an innovative way to connect unrelated writings or posts on social media platforms, and thus symbolizes the possibility generating unpredicted and infinite contexts just like the infinite number of posts that we come across when using the "#."
Following heated competition between some 80 teams that took part in the open call in this year, two teams - After New Order... and The Duck Among Us - have been chosen as finalists, and have carried out their projects for the past three months at the MMCA Residency Changdong. PROJECT HASHTAG 2021 reflects the concerns of Generation Z and millennial artists regarding online experiences and environments that are heavily influencing and rapidly reshaping our humanity. They have suggested projects that address how "the web" that has become so crucial in the post-pandemic era have brought about new social rules, ethical standards, and expression of new emotions and desire in the virtual world.
After New Order... (Yoon Choong-geun, Ki Yelim, Nam Seon-mi, Lee So-hyeon, and Lee Jisu) asks if the utopian qualities we had expected from the early Internet such as freedom, openness, and ethical values have been realized in the current online world. To do so, the team sets up alternative websites like #KoreaWebsitePrize, #AltMMCA, and #MicroDataCenter. #AltMMCA exhibits the text descriptions of the museum's collections that have been converted into text format using a screen reader program, as if they are artworks inside an open storage, to touch upon the vast amount of data that we actually deal with and its beyond human scale. #MicroDataCenter is an installation work that has visualized the size of the virtual world that consists of an astronomical number of data as well as super-national data centers that sustain and operate online platforms, through which the team enables audiences to ponder upon how intangible online activities affect their actual environment.
The Duck Among Us (Shin Hee-jung, Lee Ga-young, Jeong Man-Keun, and Son Jung-Ah) sheds light on human desires facilitated by images, videos, sounds and other types of subculture that are easily consumed and discarded. The artists present “a pixel image of a duck" in the virtual world to symbolize the cycle of the human desire. The pixel duck also represents the properties of the digital culture where everything comes and goes in the ephemerality. In the gallery hall, #WhosTheDuckAmongUs? makes its encounter with audiences through a music video, performance and installation of a duck that illustrates how the so-called "mukbang culture," an online audiovisual broadcast in which a host consumes various quantities of food while interacting with viewers, meets with the flesh. #IFeelLikeEatingYouToday, a web novel featuring four handsome boys - domestic duck, chicken, mallard duck, swan- and a genius hacker girl, deals with futuristic SF, spy, class strife, and romance that unfold in the class society where humans and animals coexist. During the exhibition period, the web novel, #IFeelLikeEatingYouToday, will be serialized for viewers on KakaoPage, a platform for collection of webtoons and web novels, and a fan sign event will be held in the gallery hall.
The works of the two teams can be viewed on the official website of PROJECT HASHTAG 2021, projecthashtag.net, using the following hypertexts: #Koreanwebsiteprize, #AltMMCA, #WhatsHappeningDictionary, #WhatsHappeningSelection, #IFeelLikeEatingYouTuday, #EgoEco-EcoEcho. Moreover, the website generates transmuting contexts by sorting out the artworks by hashtags provided by the artists. Ushered by the hashtages, users can also find further details and on-going process of the aforementioned two teams' project through interview, artist note, making process, and workshops.
Youn Bummo, Director of the MMCA, notes, "the two teams selected this year are extremely interesting in that they seek to unfold new attempts using the online space, where the so-called Generation MZ carries out activities most freely, as their motif," adding that "PROJECT HASHTAG 2021 will serve as an opportunity for audiences to take a detailed look at the next-generation artists who question what human values are in the online world that has been a new norm since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic."
