by Carolina Sculti // Mar. 20, 2026
Overlooking Lake Lugano in Switzerland, the three-story museum MASI Lugano recently opened ‘K-NOW! Korean Video Art Today,’ bringing together the works of eight Korean artists in an immersive exploration of South Korea’s contemporary art scene. Situated at a geographic and cultural crossroads between the north and south of the Alps and between Latin and Germanic Europe, the museum has served as a bridge across these divides since 2015; it reaches further with this exhibition, bringing contemporary Korean art to an international audience.
The works on view—spanning virtual reality and single and multi-channel films of varying length—resist any immediate sense of stylistic cohesion. What unites them instead is their shared use of video as a way to experience and inhabit their changing world. Each artist represented was born between the 1970s and 90s, a generation shaped by South Korea’s transition to democracy alongside the widespread assimilation of digital technologies into everyday life. Through explorations of historical memory, technological realities and performance, the exhibition offers an experience rooted in South Korea’s recent global cultural emergence, yet still resonant for any life shaped by political violence and digital culture.
Chan-kyong Park: ‘Citizen’s Forest,’ 2016, installation view in ‘K-NOW, Korean Video Art Today’ MASI Lugano, Switzerland // Photo © MASI Lugano, photo by Luca Meneghe
The first work encountered, Chan-kyong Park’s ‘Citizen’s Forest,’ is a black-and-white, three-channel projection that spans the length of the room. Across each channel, groups of figures wander repeatedly through the same forest, performing rituals rooted in traditional shamanic practices. Though the scenes feel intense and disorienting, their eventual convergence reveals a shared space, mirroring how individual memory connects to collective consciousness, and how tradition can be used to recover cultural identity amid political turmoil.
In conversation with Park, Jane Jin Kaisen’s ‘Wreckage and Offering’ shows two side-by-side videos filmed off Jeju Island, one overlaid with US propaganda footage from October 1945. A shamanic soundscape mourns the unrecovered victims of the 1948 Jeju Massacre, creating a haunting tension, reflecting how both loss and remembrance define individual migration and post-war histories.
Jane Jin Kaisen: ‘Wreckage and Offering,’ 2024, installation view in ‘K-NOW, Korean Video Art Today’ MASI Lugano, Switzerland // Photo © MASI Lugano, photo by Luca Meneghel
The main room shifts toward speculative futures, where divides between the physical and technological are blurred. Ayoung Kim’s ‘Delivery Dancers’ follows Ernst Mo, a delivery driver controlled by algorithms and moving through shifting dimensions to complete orders. Her anxiety and hyper-fixation on efficiency feel uncomfortably familiar, pointing to a future defined by increasing isolation and algorithmic-systems beyond our control.
업체eobchae’s ‘ROLA ROLLS’ turns to the climate crisis, imagining how individuals might adapt to ecological collapse driven by extractive economies, such as those explored in Kim’s work. Their film envisions rapid human evolution in a post-petroleum world, where bodies merge with machines and bacteria to generate energy. Distorted imagery and demonic voices create a sense of unease, gesturing toward the fraught relationship we have to the fossil-fuel industry. Their use of generative AI to depict this bodily transformation—a decision described by the artist as a “suicidal impulse”—adds a layer of irony, highlighting our inseparability from the very systems we critique.
Ayoung Kim: ‘Delivery Dancers,’ 2022, film still // Courtesy of the artist
Turning inward, Heecheon Kim’s ‘Ghost1990’, the exhibition’s only VR piece, explores bodily perception in the digital age. Following the stream of consciousness of a powerlifter reflecting on injury, the experience creates a sense of estrangement from one’s own body while inhabiting another’s.
The exhibition also engages with the political dimensions of contemporary Korean art, including hyper-consumerism, labor and migration and border politics. In Sungsil Ryu’s ‘Cherry Jang,’ a satirical video series, influencers and live streamers are parodied. The relentless clicking, beeping and visual overstimulation uncannily mirror the overwhelming digital environment we comfortably inhabit, bringing to light how easily we become desensitized to the content we consume.
Sungsil Ryu: ‘Cherry Jang,’ 2018, installation view in ‘K-NOW, Korean Video Art Today’ MASI Lugano, Switzerland // Photo © MASI Lugano, photo by Luca Meneghe
The exhibition’s first and last piece, staged at the museum entrance, is Sojung Jun’s ‘Green Screen’ filmed along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas—a politically charged but naturally pristine landscape. The large-scale work, showing expansive lush greeneries that gradually glitch, feels immediately invasive, demanding reflection on the ways in which land, even untouched land, is deeply politicized. Similarly, Onejonn Che’s ‘Made in Korea’ confronts labor and migration, depicting harsh manual work and systemic inequality alongside a blend of Nigerian highlife and Korean trot, capturing both the struggles and unexpected beauty that emerge from cultural blending and movement.
Sojung Jun: ‘Green Screen,’ 2021 // Courtesy of the artist
‘K-NOW!’ impressively brings together a diversity of issues shaping contemporary Korean society, all united through video—a medium that emerged alongside globalization and has famously become one of Korea’s most influential cultural exports. While international attention often focuses on the marketability of Korean art and culture, the value here lies in the artists’ perspectives on pressing social and political challenges, offering an experience that, in spite of growing divisions, has a power to dissolve boundaries.
Exhibition Info
MASI Lugano
Group Show: ‘K-NOW! Korean Video Art Today’
Exhibition: Mar. 8-July 19, 2026
masilugano.ch
Piazza Bernardino Luini 6, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland, click here for map
