The DOOSAN Curator Workshop 2013 invited Sohyun Ahn, curator at Nam June Paik Art Center, to its fourth workshop taking place on August 3, 2013. During the seminar, Workshop participants were able to learn about Ahn’s exhibition display methodology and her thoughts and opinions on a curator’s act of intervention when curating exhibitions. 
 
1) The History of Display 
Curator Sohyun Ahn, who studied museology and exhibition display methodology in France, examined the history of exhibition display by presenting diverse case studies and illustrations from a range of historical periods, ranging from the era when collections were displayed by listing them in cabinets to the era of conceptualism, when the power of the curator was maximized. Through these case studies, which also included the classification system of objects, Kandinsky’s study of color, and Goethe’s nineteenth-century chromatics, she examined diverse applications of color and the use of color in museums that emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century. It was an intriguing opportunity to learn about the various relationships and effects between the colors applied to the exhibition walls and the artworks on those walls. Ahn emphasized that “color” is a very effective method of intervention; that is, “color” could have a direct influence on artworks if a viewer were indifferent to the color of a wall and would thus focus solely on viewing the artworks. 
 
Beyond case studies on color, Ahn further discussed diverse hanging methods from the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. She noted that a monumental change in the history of display began when Alfred Barr Jr., the founding director of MoMA, first introduced the white cube into the museum. She described an anecdote where Swiss artist and museum display professional Remy Zaugg emphatically rationalized the use of the color white in a book containing his thoughts on the ideal museum, while Brian O’Doherty disputed Zaugg’s opinion and pointed out the negative aspects of the white cube. 
 
2) The Curator’s Intervention 
Curator Sohyun Ahn said that because an exhibition is both a form through which the viewer’s body moves and a form that the viewer sees, a curator should always consider the variable of the “viewer’s movement.” She presented examples of diverse twentieth-century experimental displays where a viewer’s circulation and vision were considered when composing an exhibition space. (1920, Berlin), (1938, Paris), Lazar El Lissitzky’s (1927), Frederick Kiesler’s , Herbert Bayer’s (1942): Ahn described all of these as instances in which curators (or artists) actively intervened in the display of an exhibition, and she used these cases as examples of curators’ attempts to effectively present exhibitions. 
 
Ahn also noted that thereafter, Harald Szeemann, who had a great influence on curating in Europe, first presented a concept and then showed artworks in a subordinate relationship to that concept, thus taking a position that was far from neutral. Pointing out that the concept of a “large-scale exhibition” indicates not only that an exhibition’s scale is large, but also that the exhibition has emerged from a curator’s idea, she stated that (1963) exposed this concept to an extreme degree. Through the cases that Sohyun Ahn introduced, the Workshop participants were able to reconsider how a curator’s intervention can affect an artwork. 
 
3) Examples from Nam June Paik Art Center 
Following her discussion of various case studies and the history of exhibition display, Ahn examined her own curating practice by discussing the exhibitions (2012) and (2013), which were both held at Nam June Paik Art Center. In explaining the processes of the exhibitions, both of which largely focused on sound installations and video works, she discussed allocating space depending on an artwork’s inherent characteristics and the process of installing a demanding work. Finally, she concluded her seminar with a discussion on methods of facilitating cooperation with artists when planning exhibitions, as well her own curating experiences at Nam June Paik Art Center and her curating philosophy.