Fourteenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Museums provide a wide variety of historical and cultural experiences, showing diverse artworks and artifacts to the public. Major roles of museums are making museum visitors connected with and enhancing their curiosity for various cultures. Museums should allow visitors to interact with artworks and artifacts in a culturally diverse setting and encourage the participation of various population groups across culture, age, sex, religion, and national origin. Museums, however, cannot easily attract visitors to the collections from other cultures without making special efforts. For the purposes aforementioned, I assumed, contemporary art from other cultures rather than traditional art would significantly contribute to the attraction of local visitors to the collections from other cultures. Unlike traditional art, contemporary art shares a common theme of popular culture in our society. My questions are whether contemporary Western art is more familiar with and more interesting to Korean visitors than traditional Western art and what kind of meaning and importance contemporary Western art has to the local Korean visitors. I selected the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea for this study. The purpose of this study is to find out how a museum can be transformed as for a local community into a culturally diverse learning place across various population groups and how effectively a contemporary Western art creates and facilitates visitors’ cultural experiences. Finally, I suggest how museums can collaborate to provide visitors with rich, interactive, and experimental environments.