From Seoul to Switzerland’s Southern Alps: Korean video art in motion

MASI Lugano’s K-NOW! Korean Video Art Today showcases eight handpicked artists who are pushing boundaries in film, VR, and audiovisual art, created between 2016 and 2024.

Five hundred hours of new footage are uploaded to YouTube every sixty seconds. And that’s just one site. Feature-length movies released in cinemas have been filmed entirely on iPhones. Onboarding at a new firm might see you watching introductory videos about company culture. Graphic designers are expected to have upskilled in motion design and be proficient. In short, everything is in flux. Nothing is staying still. Movement is key.

In February 2026, the 174-year-old Victoria and Albert Museum acquired the first-ever YouTube clip for its permanent collection. This feat was slightly more complex than that sentence suggests, with the V&A working with the video site to reconstruct the 2005 watch page, as the relevant online archives only go back to 2006. The reason this short clip of co-founder Jawed Karim casually at the zoo was so important to the museum is no different from that of many other prized physical objects. The clip represents the first minute of a new world, a before-and-after moment in modern society and our ubiquitous capturing and sharing of video content.

South Korea, as we know or imagine it today, is a young country, with democracy not yet forty years old. Unsurprisingly, with the widespread manufacturing of electronic goods in the East Asian industrial hubs of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China, producing video equipment alongside the country’s newfound freedoms has led to widespread enthusiasm for the hardware. In many ways, they are leading the way, tackling diverse concerns stemming from collective memory, mass migration, and challenging tradition, the gig economy and contemporary worklife, as well as more existential interest in the body and technology.

The invitation to South Korean curator Je Yun Moon to work with Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana (MASI Lugano) came from the institution’s Francesca Benini. Among the first problems to tackle was how to reduce a large, sprawling, not necessarily connected group of filmmakers to a manageable size while still representing a broad range of what the country was creating. An early decision was not to include the one name that might be more familiar to Western gallery goers, the godfather of Korean video art, Nam June Paik. While blue-chip mega-gallery Gagosian represents his estate, and his work can be found at the Tate Modern and the Pompidou, for this exhibition, all the selected artists are still alive and working.

One of the next issues was what to call the exhibition. K-NOW! is unapologetically reductive – it diminishes the complexity and multiple layers of a country and its people. It is also of the moment and unarguably inclusive. The shorthand of the letter K and the immediacy of the word now do well to encapsulate the work on display. It should encourage a wider demographic to attend the show, more familiar with K-pop, Demon Hunters, BTS, and BLACKPINK.

A further set of parameters to work with was the site itself. MASI Lugano strikingly sits on the shore of the glacial Lake Lugano, a beautiful and well-heeled area of southern Switzerland bordering Italy. While the gallery building is only a decade old, the floor-to-ceiling bright viewing windows are hardly conducive to showcasing video art. As such, it’s the basement level that hosts the bulk of the show, with a final work presented in the ground-floor foyer.

Bookended by black curtained screening spaces, the exhibition starts and ends in a more typical display format. Initially, you walk into Chan-kyong Park’s Citizens’ Forest. It’s the longest (26 minutes), oldest (2016) and widest (three parallel and concurrent overhead video projectors) piece in the exhibition. Set at a languid pace and presented in black and white, the film touches upon shamanism and hints at historical events. As a viewer, you continually scan back and forth trancelike over the forest landscape and its strange costumed inhabitants.

At the end of the exhibition, Jane Jin Kaisen’s Offering, 2023 and Wrerckage, 2024 are screened together, at a right angle. These are more overtly troubling, with their references to drowning and real-life massacres – underwater footage in part, familiar to the slow-motion footage of Bill Viola. There are echoes and responses to many Western artists and filmmakers within the show. As you might expect, art is rarely made in a vacuum. Much of the content suggests other creatives or is similar in execution, just as these pieces will, in turn, inspire others.

Humour is employed by Onejoon Che and Nigerian musician Igwe Osinachi. It is probably little known outside the respective communities, but there was significant African emigration to Korea during the 2000s, driven by energy and educational exchanges. The music video Made in Korea, 2021, looks at this diaspora with a smile on its face and a shared rhythm heard through the hanging headphones below the screen.

A second wall-mounted plasma screen features a display of the exaggerated social-climbing promotion of the fictitious streaming character Cherry Jang, a Gisaeng-like creation of artist Sungsil Ryu. There is even an opportunity to become a ‘[first class citizen]’ (https://firstclassstore.org/) online for those not planning a trip to the museum. The satire is sharp and compelling, and the video’s run time is brief enough to keep you enthralled and wanting more.

The collective 업체eobchae (Nahee Kim, Cheonseok Oh and Hwi Hwang) offers something altogether different with ROLA ROLLS, 2024. It is a nightmarish narrative swerving from a blurred out and suggestive massage table scene to an automotive-human hybrid operation, complete with an agonised patient soundtrack. The body horror is displayed through a separate geometric sculpture, with AI-generated mood boards depicting disfigurement and mutation. It’s more extreme than Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or-winning Titane, and viewer discretion is advised.

Heecheon Kim employs virtual reality in the 2021 work Ghost1990. It’s an uncertain piece, and as with much of his work, can be considered both dystopian and utopian in its reach. The participant inhabits a gym’s digital environment rather than viewing it. Still, the artist is less prescriptive about how his videos should be read than interested in posing more questions about reality and how we experience it, not least in this age of mass-recordings and endless streaming.

The most visually arresting work follows a fast-food delivery driver through the Michael Mann-like nocturnal cityscapes of Seoul, only to take interdimensional shortcuts and meet her doppelganger amid a spectrum of neons and LEDs. Ayoung Kim’s Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, 2022, is a single-channel video installation, set up centrally and wall-sized in the exhibition’s open area.

The artist has spoken of cinema retaining too many rules, and that showing the work as video in the context of a gallery makes it more readily accepted. Her experimentalism streaks across the screen, with her speculative fiction, that is science fiction anchored in reality, inspired by the isolation of Covid lockdowns and the reliance on app-based delivery services. She mused about these still-mobile, unknown carriers at a time when so many of us were stationary.

Finally, on the ground floor, specifically intended for a public space, Sojung Jun presents Green Screen, 2021. The large-scale, lush forest scene depicted is actually the demilitarised zone between South and North Korea. An area devoid of human activity or Cold War intervention has since become an ecological site of great diversity. The film’s purposeful glitches hint at something not quite right with the setting. The location is a part of history still being lived out, unresolved to this day.

Video is a loaded and dated term. Long-lost memories of hiring tapes from Blockbuster are nothing more than nostalgia for Generation X. Moving images are inexorable from who we all are, what we do, and how we consume. Even the basic advertising billboard or bus stop poster, unchanged for so long, is now a revolving sequence of animated messages. Ironically, this snapshot of Korean video art is a tantalising taste of a much wider, expansive use of film and moving image.