SeMA Public Space Project: Dance of Eternal Polarities

About the exhibition

A large crocheted structure of brown and pink industrial cotton crosses the lobby and open space of the museum's Seosomun building. The museum says the brown evokes tree trunks and night, and the pink evokes flowers and day. The structure is filled with guava and tea leaves grown in Korea. The artist's gallery, Tanya Bonakdar, specifies dried leaves, with the tea from Camellia sinensis, the plant used for drinking tea.

The museum commissioned this one work, Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities, from Ernesto Neto, and admission is free. It explains Ba Ka Ba as a sound word that begins and ends the same way, standing for rhythm, circulation and life moving between inside and outside.

The work draws on Neo-Concrete art, a Brazilian movement that valued personal experience, participation and sensation. The museum invites visitors to take part, saying that their participation completes the space.

About the artist

Ernesto Neto (b. 1964) was born in Rio de Janeiro and still lives and works in Brazil. Since the mid-1990s, Neto has made work from organic shapes and materials, including spices, sand and shells, that asks viewers for physical interaction and sensory attention. Neto represented Brazil at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery's exhibition history also lists the Hayward Gallery in London (2010), the Guggenheim Bilbao (2014) and the Grand Palais in Paris (2025).

Sources: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery: Ernesto Neto · Seoul Museum of Art: exhibition page