"Art Like Netflix" National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Art Streaming 'City of Suspense, Watch and Chill 3.0'

The World's First Subscription-Based Art Streaming Platform
Offline Exhibition Concurrently Held at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Branch

'A Museum You Can Visit at Night or Dawn'

COVID-19 halted visitors' footsteps to museums. Museums, once filled with silence and stillness, devised new ways of exhibiting. Their own collections were insufficient. To facilitate international collaborative exhibitions, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) launched a platform in 2021 and held its first collaborative exhibition with four Asian institutions that year, presenting a new concept of exhibition programming.

Exhibition view of 'City of Suspense, Watch and Chill 3.0'.
Photo by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

The 'Watch and Chill' platform introduced by MMCA in 2021 is the world's first subscription-based art streaming platform, offering a museum experience accessible anytime at home, much like Netflix as the name suggests. Following its inaugural exhibition in 2021, Watch and Chill successfully collaborated with major museums in Europe and the Middle East in 2022, and this year it expands further by partnering with leading art institutions in the Americas and Oceania to present a broader range of exhibitions.

This year's 'City of Suspense, Watch and Chill 3.0' is a large-scale media/performance event involving MMCA, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)?Australia's largest and oldest art museum, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM)?one of the oldest museums in the United States founded in the 18th century, and 20 major art museums in Mexico participating in the TONO Festival. Redesigned to enhance storytelling, tension, and immersive experiences, Watch and Chill 3.0 simultaneously offers online streaming services and offline exhibitions, allowing audiences to experience media collections from each institution and works by about 20 prominent regional artists. On the online platform, subscribers who log in can watch newly released media works weekly with Korean and English subtitles.

At the same time, the offline exhibition opening at MMCA Seoul features an architectural installation titled 'City of Suspense' (2023) by architects Puhahaha Friends (Han Seungjae, Han Yanggyu, Yoon Hanjin), creating a media environment that simulates exploring a maze as if entering a virtual world. Additionally, contemporary artists, designers, and filmmakers from Korea, Australia, the United States, Mexico, and other regions?including Park Chankyeong, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jung Jaekyung, Cecile B. Evans, and Club Ate?participate to offer audiences new experiences.

Meriem Bennani, Party at CAPS, 2018, color, oil-based, 25 minutes 28 seconds. Artist's collection [Photo by TONO]

This exhibition is composed of content exploring immersive spatiotemporal experiences through works by media artists employing the methodology of 'suspense.' It is organized into five themes: 'Landscape Under Moonlight,' 'Reconstruction of Evidence,' 'Body Mutation,' 'Undying Performance,' and 'Building a Post-Dystopian World.'

Part 1, 'Landscape Under Moonlight,' deals with eerie landscapes. Through works by Garush Melkonyan, Kwon Hayoon, Jang Minseung, Alison Nguyen, Nic Hamilton, and others, it examines the psychological shift when stability turns into alien instability and when entering unknown realms.

Part 2, 'Reconstruction of Evidence,' addresses forensic efforts to find evidence of fictional narratives or crimes that occurred in actual history. Works by Lior Shamriz, Jung Jaekyung, Paloma Contreras Lomas, Pia Borg, and Fyerool Darma add tension through the ambiguity between good and evil, conformity and violation.

Part 3, 'Body Mutation,' discusses bodies transforming into something else. Through works by Luiz Roque, Liang Luscombe, Lior Shamriz, Meriem Bennani, and Song Sanghee, it reveals scenes of bodily mutation and transformation occurring between life and death, survival and salvation.

Sanghee Song, Revive Again, My Child, 2017, 3-channel video, color, black and white, sound, 17 minutes.
[Photo by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art]

Part 4, 'Undying Performance,' explores performances experimenting with immortality by reenacting life legacies. Works by Naomi Rinc?n Gallardo, Jung Eunyoung, Karina Utomo & C?r8, and Club Ate stage the otherness symbolized by the 'undead' and the intimacy among non-human entities, highlighting relationships that reject normative interactions.

Part 5, 'Building a Post-Dystopian World,' examines the illusion of dystopia by imagining worst-case scenarios and reconsiders the meaning of visualizing disasters. By exploring alternative narratives set in imagined worlds created by artists such as Park Chankyeong, Skawennati, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jung Jaekyung, and Chitra Ganesh, the exhibition gauges the contemporary subjects' confrontation with the world.

After opening at MMCA Seoul, this exhibition will tour internationally, participating in the TONO Festival in Mexico in late April at Museo Anahuacalli and other museums, followed by the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in the United States in November, and as part of the NGV Triennale at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia in March next year. The art streaming service 'Watch and Chill 3.0' will operate until April 2024, when the final touring exhibition concludes.