THE REMINISCENCE MUSEUM

2020

Charcoal, ink, acrylic, paper, fabric

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The Reminiscence Museum is an interactive paper structure that plays around with shapes, openings, concave surfaces, and texture. The concept of the work is expressed as an installation piece and also in a video format in which the spectators are taken on a virtual tour inside the museum itself. The installation has five parts: the lobby, gallery a, gallery b, the six rooms, and the midnight spot. Each part is telling a different story. The galleries are not necessarily exhibiting artworks but memories of mine. 

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My research is about curatorial choices within museum architecture and how they influence the audience’s experience with art. I was inspired by Herbert Bayer’s Floor plan for the exhibition “Bauhaus 1919-1928,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 7, 1938-January 30, 1939 at MoMA. Herbert Bayer, an artist, and curator created exhibition floor plans and exhibition strategies throughout his artistic career. I decided to use Bayer’s strategies to analyze how curators’ perceptions are altered by architecture from three innovative museum structures: MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. Each museum is structured differently such as in a spiral, like a maze or have rooms hidden within a huge circular surface. I analyzed how a curator could curate an installation piece in distinct ways in three spaces such as arrange it with other artworks according to the years of art movements, hang in the middle and also place it outside to expose to nature. 

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After looking at the museums, I decided to make my own version of a museum that also experiments with structure but exhibits contents in a more surrealistic way. Starting from the first floor, it is a combination of a lobby, a cafe, and a garden outdoor. The second level contains two showrooms with doors revealing different things or more space behind. The audience is able to flip through the paper and rearrange works by hanging them. Going to the upper floor, there are more closed-up spaces, which are more private to me. The six rooms symbolize rooms that are important to me such as my bedroom, art studios, cafes, and more. The upper left corner is the midnight spot, which is where spectators could stand to see the night sky revealed through irregularly shaped windows.