National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul presents Watch and Chill 2.0: Streaming Senses

June 10–September 12, 2022

From Friday, June 1 to Monday, September 12, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA; Director Youn Bummo) presents Watch and Chill 2.0: Streaming Senses at MMCA Seoul as the second season of Watch and Chill, the world’s first subscription-based streaming platform for contemporary art, where audiences around the world can freely access the media collection of major international art institutions.

Watch and Chill, a project created by MMCA and offered in partnership with notable art institutions, allows subscribers all over the world to view works from the participating institutions’ media holdings as well as the artists of each community. Its debut season, which began last year, was a partnership between four Asian museums, including M+ in Hong Kong. The platform now expands its partners to Europe and the Middle East, then next year to the Americas and Oceania, as part of a three-year plan.

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea is collaborating on Watch and Chill 2.0: Streaming Senses with ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, which has one of Europe’s largest architecture collections, and Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) in the United Arab Emirates, which organizes the Sharjah Biennial, among other programs. Jihoi Lee, Hoor Al Qasimi, and James Taylor-Foster are the curators of Watch & Chill 2.0. Under the theme of digital sensoria and its synergy today, Watch and Chill streams works from roughly 20 artists from across the world while also displaying them in physical spaces as part of worldwide traveling exhibitions.

Every week, subscribers to Watch and Chill will be notified of a new piece of work. (There are subtitles in both Korean and English.) The offline exhibition at MMCA Seoul introduces Air Rest, a sensory terrain created by the architectural company BARE (Yunhee Choi and Jinhong Jeon) by building pneumatic modular pieces composed of semi-transparent air structure. Andreas Wannerstedt, the team of An Jungju and Jun Sojung, Kim Ayoung, Sylbee Kim, and Maha Maamoun are among the other artists, designers, and producers from Korea, Europe, and the Middle East who are participating.

The contents for both the online platform and the offline exhibition respond to the relationship between technology and human perceptual systems, venturing beyond the flatness of the screen to evoke various forms of synesthesia. They consist of four sub-topics: “Optical Tactility,” “Calibrated Projection, “Trance, Cross, Move,” and “Bits of the Spirit.”

Watch and Chill 2.0: Streaming Senses will open in September at the Al Mureijah Art Spaces of Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) in the UAE, and in October at ArkDes (the Swedish Centre for Architecture Design) in Stockholm, after its offline show at MMCA Seoul. The art streaming site Watch and Chill will be available until December 2022, when the final touring program closes. Meta Open Arts has contributed to the exhibition’s success.

The Tales I Tell 2.0, a satellite project, is also available on the online platform. This initiative broadens the scope of Watch and Chill by publishing literary pieces that examine the online platform’s user experience from the humanities, sociology, and performing arts viewpoints. Other events include a talk and performance (6 July) titled “ASMR—Digital Intimacy and Care,” featuring performance studies scholar So-Rim Lee and ASMR artists Miniyu and UNO, as well as a roundtable (12 August) titled “I See a Scent,” featuring neuroscientist Jang Dongsun and professor Moon Jeil, as well as participating artists Kim Ayoung and Yeom Ji Hye. Both events will be broadcast live online from MMCA Seoul’s Gallery 7.