Arko opens exhibit run by 'school' of artists relying on each other to survive uncertain age

The Arko Art Center opened an exhibition on Friday that will not look the same twice.

“The Art of Learning: Becoming Each Other’s School” brings together 42 artists who learned their craft from their peers rather than mentors. One team plans to strip its display and rebuild it every four days, while another has built a wiki website that will outlive the show itself.

Artist collectives that double as study groups are not new, and researchers have tracked them for years. What is unusual, however, is a collective putting on an actual exhibition.

Arko has dubbed the eight teams — Material Library, Mockcamp, Birdcall, Kuroda, Curating School Seoul, Happy Class, PIE and YPC × Rat Journal — as an “art school,” though none are schools in an accredited sense.

The museum operated a similar program to back emerging artists at Insa Art Space in Jongno District, central Seoul, for 25 years, but shut it down last year. “The Art of Learning: Becoming Each Other’s School” takes over the previous program’s role.

Each of the eight groups has something distinct in how they were formed and what they’ve chosen to display.

Happy Class consists of six painters who began following the late artist Bahc Yi-so’s curriculum in 2023, creating daily and meeting monthly to show their sketchbooks to one another — not to be judged, but to have an audience. As a result, their section of the show displays their sketchbooks themselves, unbound for visitors to leaf through, and a wall of art: one painting from each artist’s portfolio, chosen by another member.

Kuroda is a trio: an artist, a writer and a manga illustrator who met at a cafe in Itaewon in 2022 and have made manhwa (Korean comics and print cartoons) together since. Their contributions to the exhibition include a comic about running a collective and a table where visitors can write letters.

Yellow Pen Club began in 2015 with three people studying art criticism and has run YPC Space in Seoul since 2022. For the show, the club has set up a table with Rat Journal, a writing group, displaying sculptures — a tangerine, a crow’s head, a walking carton of banana milk — that visitors can bring home in exchange for writing a few sentences about their chosen piece.

Curating School Seoul — which admits 10 members per semester based on what they want to create rather than what they’ve studied — interviewed half the show’s participants twice about how they became artists and turned their answers into collaged diagrams.

Others brought actual infrastructure. Group Mockcamp exists because a member could not get a deposit on a house in Hyehwa-dong; she then learned how to build partitions and tile floors from construction workers, renovated a house and opened it to the public last year. Anyone can stay there for one week for free as long as they bring two other people and spend their time practicing an installation method. Eight Mockcamp members will do exactly that inside Arko, rebuilding their display every four days until the exhibition’s closing date.

Material Library, an extracurricular college research group, is presenting five of its 16 material studies conducted since 2024. Birdcall, a one-person study space, has built a reading room, with books organized by association rather than subject. PIE, a collective that has run practical curricula since 2014, has built a public wiki for artists.

“We call this an art school only for this exhibition’s purpose,” said Noh Hae-na, the Arko Art Center curator who organized the show, at a press conference at the museum on Thursday. “What we wanted to talk about was a school somewhat outside […] established educational bodies, formal curricula, universities.”

“These groups are talking about the conditions of the art world, and what they organize is less of an exhibition than a meeting, a network of people,” Noh added. “‘School’ evokes images of people gathering, pursuing learning, being allowed to fail. It’s a process-centered frame, and we found that useful.”

The comparison to earlier waves of artist-run activities is hard to avoid — such as the alternative spaces of the 1990s and the “new spaces” of the mid-2010s — as is the question of whether “school” is too grand a word for what are, in practice, study groups.

“Eight teams hardly represent the [art] field, of course, but I think that they can help us look at a tendency,” Noh said, defending the term. “There’s something ambivalent about self-organizing. It has to do with how artists survive an uncertain, neoliberal age.”

“Working independently, removed from institutions while still touching them, ironically carries the features of neoliberalism: flexible labor, freelancing and the emphasis on connection and networks,” the curator continued. “We wanted to show that structural conditions are producing this [exhibition], and we’ll cover that in the programs.”

About 20 public programs will take place alongside the exhibition, including reading clubs, workshops, talks and a September roundtable on how people become each other’s school — all free, like the exhibition itself.

“The Art of Learning: Becoming Each Other’s School” runs at the Arko Art Center through Sept. 27.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]