ernesto neto suspends colossal crocheted installation within seoul museum of art

"The Seoul Museum of Art presents 'Ernesto Neto: Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities,' a new site-specific installation by the Brazilian artist that transforms the Korean museum's Seosomun Main Branch lobby into a sensory environment. Commissioned as part of the 2025 SeMA Public Space Project, the woven artwork expands Ernesto Neto's longstanding interest in the relationships between body, space, and collective experience."

"Ernesto Neto's installation at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) is composed of expansive crochet structures woven from industrial cotton fabrics in shades of brown and pink. These colors, chosen to evoke tree trunks and night alongside flowers and day, establish a dialogue between natural rhythms and architectural structure. Suspended and filled with dried guava leaves and locally sourced tea leaves, the artist's forms invite a multi-sensory encounter that engages smell both texture together."

Ernesto Neto's Ba Ka Ba transforms the Seosomun Main Branch lobby into a site-specific, sensory environment of expansive crochet structures. The woven forms use industrial cotton fabrics in brown and pink to evoke tree trunks, night, flowers and day, while dried guava leaves and locally sourced tea leaves fill suspended volumes to introduce scent. The installation disrupts the museum's linear architecture with flowing, cyclical spatial relations that blur center and periphery, interior and exterior. Visitors move through and around the textiles, experiencing shifting sensations and dialogues between body, space, sensation, thought, self and other.

Read at designboom | architecture & design magazine