Interview with Bartomeu Marí

On a visit to Seoul in late June, I spoke with Bartomeu Marí, the new director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), at his office in the museum’s main campus in Jogno-gu. Marí has been in the top job at Korea’s national museum for just six months, and his exhibition program does not begin until 2017. He arrived in mid-December at an institution that had had no director for more than one year and itself had been roiled by scandal when the previous director, Jeong Hyeon-min, resigned in October 2014 after reports of nepotism and preferential hiring to her former students and colleagues from Seoul National University. Having already written about the censorship controversy that Marí was involved in at his previous post as director of Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), as well as the strong, wary reactions from the Korean art community to his appointment, our conversation focused on Marí’s future vision to restore the beleaguered MMCA. To date, since its completion in 2013, the museum’s large campus in central Seoul, near nonprofit art centers and commercial galleries, is still not yet being fully utilized, and the government is building yet another branch.

• South Korea
• Korea
• South