Junghyun Kim

Do you have a garden? Having a garden would mean that there is something to take care of by spending your time. The museum you visited has people who manage artworks, and the area where you're standing on your two feet. They created a garden on the outdoor terrace on the second floor with artist Kim Leepark in the past few months when the museum was closed due to COVID-19 from late spring to autumn. Although it is a garden, it has crops that are more useful than ornamental flowers or plants.

While running the garden, Kim Leepark was called a ‘gardener’ who manages the garden, and the participants decided to call each other by the name of their favorite plants, not by their real names. Thus, the gardener and the participants opened the door to conversations about the crops they wanted to plant and began their relationship as members of the garden. They quarreled with each other to take the first fruit they had made, and they did tough things first so as not to be a burden to the others. They have been cultivating each other's gardens in a warm but loose relationship, teaching each other recipes, sharing side dishes, and talking about childhood memories related to crops.

In fact, even though there was no reason for someone to take responsibility for harvesting, each person had no role to play, there were invisible but busy hands in pots carried by time every morning for fear of moist soil and leaves burning in the sun. Seeing the habits of the participants formed by taking care of the museum's housekeeping for such a long time, one by one, I realized that this garden was not the only one they had handled with affection. All the places they could reach to maintain the white cube and neatly arranged art gallery corridors were gardens for them.

Sitting in the garden, think about what makes them sprout and bear fruit. Trying to look at the invisibles in the museum, one of the places where what we see is the most important. Even if it's not an active solidarity, loose attention to caring and sharing each other supports and maintains our lives. This world you see is operated by its 'maintenance' power.

In the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, 12 facility cleaners, 5 facility security guards, 7 facility maintenance workers, and 2 receptionists do their jobs for the museum.