À la recherche d’une muséographie internationale dans une nation globale

la construction du nouveau Musée national d’art contemporain de Corée du Sud dans les années 1980

Abstract

In the last three decades, museums around all over the world have been engaged in increasingly complex international dynamics, which partly led to renew and reinvent themselves. In South Korea also, the opening of museums to their international environment by the 1980s − along with the Seoul Asian Games (1986) and the Seoul Olympic Games (1988) − was a powerful factor that have influenced the transformation of national museum landscape. Since then, Korean museums, whose activities and programs were so far based on the national traditions and structures, have gradually begun to redefine themselves, adopting the so-called “modernist international” standards. While this phenomenon intensifies in the current age of cultural consumption and globalization, so far, there has been very little research reported on the evolution and the identity politics of the South Korean museums in relation to the nation’s internationalization movement. Focusing on the remaking project of the National Museum of Contemporary Art of South Korea (MMCA) in the 1980s, the article highlights the dynamic interaction between the national and the international dimension of the project, participating in the symbolic re-imagination of nation as global player.