National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul presents Looking After Each Other
Richard Dougherty, DeafSpace: Kissing Chairs, 2025. Commissioned by MMCA. Photo: Hong Cheolki.
SEOUL.—
MMCA Seoul presents Looking After Each Other, a thematic exhibition exploring the diverse conditions of different bodies and the possibilities that emerge from their interdependent relations. The exhibition reimagines the museum as a public space welcoming all bodies—those who are healthy, elderly, disabled, or living with illness—and as a site for experimenting with modes of encounter and relationship. It highlights aesthetic practices that challenge conventional notions of “vulnerable bodies” and offers strategies for embracing bodily difference, broadening awareness of corporeal diversity, and contributing to the common good through mutual care and understanding.
Organized around three interwoven themes—Inclining Bodies, Odd Communities, and When Different Bodies Meet—the exhibition features over 40 works by 15 artists and collectives across drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, design, and architecture. Rather than treating bodily difference as something to be observed or accommodated, the exhibition centers practices grounded in embodied critique, interdependence, and radical hospitality.
Inclining Bodies presents vulnerability not as a lack but as a source of agency and relation. GuNa’s sculptural works, Christine Sun Kim’s Deaf-centered drawings, and Sara Hendren and Caitrin Lynch’s documentation of everyday design adaptations reframe bodily variation as generative. Panteha Abareshi confronts the stigma and desexualization of disabled bodies, while Cho Youngjoo and Chun Kyungwoo reflect on aging and intimacy through lived experiences of transformation and care.
Odd Communities examines spatial, linguistic, and institutional structures that shape how we move and gather. David Gissen and Richard Dougherty draw from their disabled perspectives to invert normative design logics in urban space. Alecia Neo choreographs care as a relational language, while Kim Eunseol reflects on communication through the Deaf experience. Yoon Choong-geun interrogates museum systems of signage and orientation. Rather than framing inclusion as accommodation, these works propose co-existence through embodied language and mutual transformation.
When Different Bodies Meet unfolds as a program series from 16 May to 15 June 2025 in the Seoul Box. Choreographers Kim Wonyoung and Chung Ji Hye approach prosthesis as a metaphor for relational possibility, while Yoon Sangeun expands ballet into non-visual modes. Feminist activist Kim Youngok joins Dancing Waist members Cho Mikyeong and Lee Jinhee to reflect on solidarity across age, gender, and disability. In a collaborative performance, Choi Taeyoon and Yon Natalie Mik interweave disability and migration, reimagining bodies as subjects of care rather than means of production.
As a tangible gesture toward institutional access, Richard Dougherty’s DeafSpace: Kissing Chairs (2025) reconfigures the MMCA Seoul entrance. These face-to-face seats atop the front steps redirect visitors toward the adjacent ramp, proposing access through a Deaf-centered spatial logic. Developed with students from the Seoul National School for the Deaf, the chairs’ vivid colors enhance signed conversation, merging aesthetic and communicative function. The overall exhibition design follows DeafSpace principles and was developed with an accessibility advisory team and local partners. The exhibition includes tactile navigation, easy-to-read texts, conversational audio descriptions, and a Calming Space. A fully web-accessible catalogue—offering large text, audio, and dark mode—features contributions by Gurunim (Kim Jiwoo) and Ahn Heejeh, whose writings draw on firsthand experiences of illness and disability.
Looking After Each Other is not only an exhibition, but a shared proposition: museums can become places of reciprocal recognition, shaped by our movements—unevenly, interdependently, and on our terms.
Artists: Panteha Abareshi, Cho Youngjoo, Choi Taeyoon x Yon Natalie Mik, Chun Kyungwoo, Richard Dougherty, Irene Cheng x David Gissen x Brett Snyder, GuNA, Sara Hendren x Caitrin Lynch, Christine Sun Kim, Kim Eunseol, Kim Wonyoung x Chung Ji Hye, Kim Yongok x Cho Mikyeong x Lee Jinhee, Alecia Neo, Yoon Choong-geun, Yoon Sangeun
Curators: Lee Jihoi, Lee Jooyeon
