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Beyond the exhibition space,

“The show must go on”

<The Show Must Go On> (TSMGO) started in July 2012 with Korean artists. It is planned as a reaction of international biennale fever. There are so many biennales than we imagine, but only a few artists from Korea are invited. Until now, only the occasional group exhibitions of Korean Contemporary Art offered a chance for Korean artists to present themselves abroad. These national group exhibitions provide a helpful first step for the artists, as in the case of Chinese and Japanese artists. Such group exhibitions, however, seldom manage to show the full depth of an artist’s work. It is therefore difficult to present an artist where his presence is limited to one or two pieces of work. Even though there are many interesting themes in biennale from great curators, most artists have no chance to think about it or be involved in this interesting discourse. It is not many different from curators. So, we would like to make our own field.

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The initial plan of this project also focused on promoting Korean contemporary artists abroad in 2012. We made a strategy to organize talks and workshops instead of exhibitions. It is because artists’ ‘works’(and often not the artists themselves)are invited to many international exhibitions. But artists hardly have a chance to go abroad and talk about what they are thinking with foreign audience. For those reasons, we organized artists’ talk program in London, Kota Kinabalu, Seoul in 2012, and the project called ‘traveling portfolio suitcase’.