SEOUL, Nov. 3 (Korea Bizwire) – The Seoul branch of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), will host the ‘Project Hashtag’ exhibition, supporting interdisciplinary collaboration beyond the boundaries of the arts, starting on Friday.
‘Project Hashtag,’ which began with the sponsorship of Hyundai Motor and celebrates its fourth anniversary this year, is a project aimed at discovering and promoting young cultural and art creators. This year’s finalists are the Rice Brewing Sisters Club and Lab B, who will showcase the outcomes of their projects after breaking through a competition rate of 51:1.
In March, the area in front of the Seoul Museum of Art would come alive during lunchtime, with many people voluntarily gathering for an event organized by a financial services company. This event allowed participants to earn cash by simply activating the company’s mobile app.
The artist group Lab B drew inspiration from this event and focused on the concept of ‘playbor,’ which blends elements of play and labor. The artist group interpreted ‘playbor’ as a phenomenon that illustrates human alienation resulting from an increasingly automated society and sought to visualize it through their artwork.
Lab B will present ‘From Tilling the Fields to Hitting the MMCA’ at the Project Hashtag exhibition. This artwork is a narrative that revolves around labor, taking the form of a role-playing game.
In preparation for the exhibition, Lab B spent six months cultivating a field and growing corn in Ganghwa, Incheon. They then transformed the harvested corn into ‘GangNaengYi’ (seasoned puffed corn).
Visitors can acquire GangNaengYi, the tangible outcome of Lab B’s labor, through playbor. By engaging in a mobile web-based agricultural simulation game developed by Lab B using a QR code on the exhibition hall wall, participants carry out tasks such as plowing, watering, and stone removal, earning virtual currency that can be exchanged for a bag of GangNaengYi produced through Lab B’s actual labor. In this way, spectators actively participate in digital labor by playing the game to obtain GangNaengYi.
The other artist group whose works will be exhibited, ‘Rice Brewing Sisters Club’ (Son Hye-min and Ryu So-yoon), has transformed the museum’s exhibition hall into a ‘Holobiont Galaxy.’ The partitions defining the space of the Holobiont Galaxy are crafted from agar-agar films, while the various colorful sculptures scattered throughout the space are made from agar-agar lumps.
Since 2020, Rice has been conducting research on algae from the seawater of Busan, paying particular attention to agar-agar, which transitions from a liquid state at low temperatures to a solid state at room temperature. Leveraging this unique property of agar-agar, Rice will showcase artwork that explores whether agar-agar can serve as an environmentally friendly alternative to materials like plastics or fabrics, which are major sources of pollution. Additionally, the agar-agar lumps serve as a form of microbial culture medium, making them a suitable material for conveying the story of symbiosis.
Image credit: Yonhap & Hyundai Motor Co. / photonews@koreabizwire.com
