The world-renowned American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer presents MMCA Commissioned Project Jenny Holzer: FOR YOU at Seoul Box, the lobby of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (hereafter MMCA), Seoul, and the outdoor space of the MMCA Gwacheon through July 5, 2020. The MMCA Commissioned Project spearheads collaborations leading international contemporary artists in order to generate a new platform for discourse on contemporary art on the museum premises. In 2019, the MMCA has collaborated with Jenny Holzer who utilizes language as her primary medium, experimenting with incisive poetic and aphoristic text to directly engage pressing social issues and injustice, and to provide a voice for the marginalized. Holzer’s works conceptually transform the museum space by encouraging debate and reflection on an array of compelling issues.

Installed on the wall of the first floor lobby at the MMCA Seoul, Inflammatory Essays and Truisms have been translated into Korean for the first time ever. Comprised of over 250 brief alphabetized statements, Truisms concern the oftentimes ironic construction of personal and societal beliefs, mores, and truths. Influenced by Holzer’s readings of political, utopian, art, religious, and other manifestos, Inflammatory Essays are a collection of 100-word texts. In Seoul Box, Holzer’s new monumental LED work titled FOR YOU foregrounds the voices of five contemporary female authors—Kim Hyesoon, Han Kang, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Svetlana Alexievich, and Hawzhin Azeez—who give voice to those bereft of human rights by manmade tragedies of today. At the MMCA Gwacheon, Holzer presents a selection of eleven Truisms, permanently engraved onto the railing of a stone bridge in the outdoor sculpture garden. In this project, Holzer actively engages with and addresses pressing issues by encouraging reflections on collective concerns and personal anxieties, further broadening the possibilities of public engagement with art.