Full description from the venue
Off the White is a relay exhibition through which the Ilmin Museum of Art, marking the 100th anniversary of its architecture, explores contemporary art’s experiments and prospects concerning the museum as a place. Completed in 1926 as the Dong-A Ilbo headquarters, this building began as the offices of a modern newspaper company and has since transformed into an institution engaging with a broad range of visual culture. Against this background, the museum now erects white exhibition halls, places artworks within them, and produces discourse and images. In this sense, the museum exceeds the meaning of a space in which artworks are simply stored; it is where artworks are newly perceived and reconstituted.
Unlike the conventional understanding of “site” in art as a setting endowed with irreplaceable specificity, Off the White attends to what precedes such enunciation in the form of an intervention or a frame. It looks instead to another order of conditions that enable the museum before a given location is called forth as a site. These include the by-products of the museum’s operation: walls and floors, light and ornament, storage and transport protocols, attitudes toward display and viewing, and immaterial registers such as feelings and habits. The artists who have attended to these elements reveal the museum as a singular position where the force and sensibility of artworks are negotiated between a neutral white environment and a “specific site.”
Kwak Eve treats the walls of the Ilmin Museum of Art as plates already bearing marks, turning their surfaces into sites where new records emerge. In The Korean Flag and Mosquito Net , Kwak applies lining paper to walls bearing traces of artworks repeatedly hung and removed. She then takes rubbings of their surfaces as though transcribing them, while drawing forms derived from observations outside the museum. Traces that emerge through contact overlap with images inscribed by the movement of the hand, producing marks that register both the time accumulated in the exhibition hall and the authority and affect surrounding this place. Kwak has long treated a conceptual plane devoid of undulation as a kind of depth with intangible relief. For her, marks are a mode that prompts a reading of the surface without assigning it an external referent or reducing it to one. Kwak has held solo exhibitions including MoveMove (2024), Gray-White Hair (2017), and Face to Face Construction-Architecture Project: Part (2017), and has participated in group exhibitions at the Seoul Museum of Art, ARKO Art Center, and the Ilmin Museum of Art, among others.
Noh Songhee turns the floor of the Ilmin Museum of Art into a puzzle in flux. A puzzle can produce multiple scenes through the arrangement of its scattered pieces, yet it remains bound by their predetermined shapes and cut lines. In this structure, Noh sees the workings of the archive, where materials from the past are selected and arranged to constitute the present. Puzzle draws on documents found in the museum’s archive to examine how the museum’s exhibition history has been administered through quantitative systems such as dates, budgets, and dimensions. The hand-engraved images in aluminum relate to the numbers 5, 10, 12, and 100, which partition and commemorate time. Taken together, these marks are at once a game that reveals the compromised character of the archive and a record that renders visible the labor concealed behind information. Noh has held solo exhibitions including Shaping the Archives (2025) and DIZZY (2023), and has participated in group exhibitions at Art Archives Seoul Museum of Art, as well as in the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale and the special exhibition marking the 30th anniversary of the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, among others.