There has been a shift in the roles and nature of a museum that keeps and displays the cultural legacy of mankind. Specifically, museums lately give the top priority to smooth communication with visitors, and eventually direct a lot of energy into imp...
There has been a shift in the roles and nature of a museum that keeps and displays the cultural legacy of mankind. Specifically, museums lately give the top priority to smooth communication with visitors, and eventually direct a lot of energy into improving the method of display, educational program and service. In particular, exhibition is most important for communication with spectators as the core function of museum, and exhibition-viewer communication is primarily built on visual elements.
A museum exhibition is a communication activity that shows something on purpose to convey a particular message. Communication refers to what a sender, namely exhibition planner, constructs and visualize a meaning through exhibits to communicate with spectators, and viewers are able to learn by reinterpreting the meaning that the exhibition planner generated. The purpose of this study was to delve into the communication and educational function of museum exhibition.
In this study, museum exhibition was defined as a medium of communication, and visual culture was selected as the sphere of communication. And past and present visual culture was deem in this study to be comprehensive of diverse elements that make up exhibition. As it's possible to analyze the semantic action of diverse sorts of visual culture by employing semiology, exhibition cases were reviewed from a semiologic perspective, and the meaning generation process of exhibition communication was explained as the interchange, compromise, reinter- pretation and representation of the past and modern visual culture. To make a case analysis, three domestic museums and one foreign museum were selected: the National Folk Museum of Korea, Seoul Museum of History, Sudoguksan Museum of Housing and Living, and Quai Branly Museum. In which process the selected museums visualized the intention of exhibition and how spectators interpreted it were mainly examined.
After reviewing relevant theories and cases, it's found that the inter- pretation of museum exhibition might hinge on the personal knowledge of viewers, and that they are in want of visual literacy, namely an ability of reading and interpreting exhibition, to have a significant experience in museum. In this study, how they could boost their visual literacy was explored.
As the importance of visual elements is increasingly accentuated in the exhibition of modern museums, museum exhibition was discussed as a place to show visual culture, and how exhibition planners visualized intended messages was criticized in association with visual culture. When planners arranged relics into exhibition and represented contemporary situations by employing particular models, they sought after aesthetic communication between exhibits and viewers by symbolizing the entire exhibition space, and the changing display style of museums seemed to stem from the unique characteristics of modern society that put stress on visual culture.
Since it could be said that the beginning of museum education is to view exhibition and find a meaning in it. So this study attempted to lay the theoretical groundwork for replacing current program-centered museum education with display-centered one.
A museum is a space to deliver a specific message about the cultural legacy of the world and to communicate with spectators. That is a place where the past and present culture encounters. In order to determine the right directions for museum in fast-changing society, it's important to look back on the past, to preserve all the materials of the past, to shed light on rapidly changing modern culture including daily routine visual environments, to look into the meaning of the visual environments, and to consider how to bolster the visual literacy of viewers. That will allow a museum to perform dynamic roles in conjunction with the past and present knowledge system, culture and education instead of merely function as a storehouse of the past memory.