Museum 1
A contemporary art museum in Busan built around room-scale digital environments, with moving images carried across floors, walls and ceilings alongside installations and object-based work
Large-scale media art, installations, photography, painting, sculpture and other contemporary art in a compact Centum City venue
Two floors that alternate between room-filling screen environments and smaller galleries, with the display infrastructure built permanently into the museum
Museum 1’s defining medium is the room itself. Its permanent display system lets digital work occupy the visitor’s whole field of view, then smaller galleries bring the scale back down to individual objects
Character
At Museum 1, digital images spread beyond a single wall. LED and LCD surfaces carry moving work across the floor, walls and ceiling of the main rooms, wrapping the display around the visitor’s field of view
The system is part of the building, not a temporary projection setup. About 80 million LEDs are distributed through the two-storey interior, giving moving-image work a scale closer to an environment than a picture hung in a gallery
The museum does not stay at that scale everywhere. Installations, photography, painting, sculpture and ceramics appear in smaller spaces around the large media rooms, so the visit repeatedly shifts between being surrounded by an image and standing in front of an individual work
The experience
The largest rooms change the normal distance between viewer and artwork. Images continue beneath your feet and above your head, and peripheral vision becomes part of the experience. A single frame is difficult to isolate because the display extends across several surfaces at once
Moving into the smaller galleries changes the rhythm. Objects and conventional wall-based works ask for a closer, more selective kind of looking after the broad visual field of the media rooms. That change of scale is central to the museum’s effect; it keeps the digital environments from becoming the only visual language in the building
The individual artists and exhibitions change, but the display architecture remains. That makes the physical setup a more reliable reason to visit than any one temporary program
History
The institution opened in August 2019 as Museum DAH. It was founded by the media-art duo col.l.age+ together with the art production company Kunst1, with high-resolution LED and LCD surfaces integrated into the building from the beginning
At the opening, the founders described a broad idea of contemporary art that could include furniture, designed environments, digital images and objects alongside more conventional forms. The room-scale display system was therefore part of the institution’s original proposition, not a later technical upgrade
The museum reopened under the Museum 1 name in March 2022. Its current program continues to place large digital environments beside installations and object-based contemporary art
Before you go
The contrast worth paying attention to is scale. Spend enough time in one of the large media rooms to notice how the image uses the floor and ceiling as well as the walls, then compare that with the smaller galleries where individual objects regain their edges
Museum 1 is close to Centum City Station and is compact enough for a focused visit. Gallery rules restrict backpacks and tripods, which matters if you are arriving with luggage or photography equipment
- Hours
- Open Monday–Friday 10:00–19:00 and weekends/public holidays 10:00–20:00. Last entry is one hour before closing
- Admission
- General admission: adults KRW 18,000; ages 14–19 KRW 15,000; children 36 months–13 years KRW 13,000; eligible special-category visitors KRW 11,000. Group rates apply from 30 people with advance reservation
- Access
- Groups of 30 or more should apply at least seven days ahead. Food and drinks, backpacks and tripods are not allowed in the galleries
- Transit
- From Centum City Station on Busan Metro Line 2, use Exit 6 or 8; the museum is about five minutes away on foot