13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Séance: Technology of the Spirit Catalogue Launch

Please join us on January 22 at 7pm for the launch of the illustrated catalogue of the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Séance: Technology of the Spirit, featuring a conversation with catalogue contributor Alexandra Munroe, as well as a screening of Onisaburō Deguchi’s Shōwa no Shichifukujin (The Seven Lucky Gods). The event will be introduced by the catalogue's English editor, Ben Eastham.

For this launch event, pioneering curator Alexandra Munroe will be in conversation with the exhibition’s curators–Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis–to discuss the Japanese religious movement Oomoto and the work of Onisaburō Deguchi, the movement’s former spiritual leader, whose work was featured in the Biennale. The evening will commence with a screening of Deguchi’s Shōwa no Shichifukujin (The Seven Lucky Gods).

The Biennale’s richly illustrated publication documents, contextualizes, and expands upon the exhibition’s desire to explore the entanglement of art and spiritual practice from the dawn of modernity to the present, connecting the mystics and mediums who prefigured the emergence of modern and abstract art to contemporary artists from around the world. Comprising 340 color pages across 650 in total, this bilingual English–Korean publication presents a map of that complex historical relationship. Eleven newly commissioned texts reflect on the influence of marginalized belief systems on the development of modern and contemporary art, collectively proposing an alternative—or complement—to the prevailing formalist, social, or materialist accounts. 

Séance: Technology of the Spirit is co-published by Seoul Museum of Art and Mediabus and edited in English by Ben Eastham and in Korean by Jihee Jun. It is designed by nonplace studio (Shanghai). The publication will be available for purchase at the event, and is also available through The Book Society (Seoul), Idea Books, and online here.

Film

Onisaburō Deguchi, Shōwa no Shichifukujin (The Seven Lucky Gods) (1935, 28 minutes)
The silent film Shōwa no Shichifukujin—in which the seven lucky gods of the title are played by Onisaburō in elaborate costumes—exemplifies Onisaburō’s pioneering use of new media to spread its word. The calligraphic title cards were handwritten in classical meter by Onisaburō, who also composed the accompanying poems. Most copies of the film were destroyed by the Japanese authorities during its campaign to suppress Oomoto. Yet the movement continues to this day, with art at the heart of its spiritual program.

For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility           
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.        
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

Anton Vidokle is an artist and editor of e-flux journal.

Hallie Ayres is currently co-curator of the 13th edition of Seoul Mediacity Biennale, was on the curatorial team for Cosmos Cinema, the 14th Shanghai Biennale, and is associate director of e-flux.

Lukas Brasiskis is Curator of Film & Video at e-flux; one of the three artistic directors of the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2025); and cocurator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale (2023–24). He holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from NYU and writes and teaches about moving-image art.

Alexandra Munroe, PhD, is an award-winning curator, Asia scholar, and author focusing on art, culture, and institutional global strategy. She is Senior Curator at Large, Global Arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, where she leads the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative and serves as a senior founding curator of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project. Munroe has worked on over forty exhibitions and is recognized for her pioneering scholarship on artists Cai Guo Qiang, Daido Moriyama, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Ufan, Mu Xin, and Yoko Ono, among others, and for bringing such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, Japanese otaku culture, and Chinese conceptual art to international attention. Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” (2017), which Artnews named one of the top twenty-five most influential shows of the decade. Her exhibition “Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust” was named among the “Top 8 Hits” of the 2024 Venice Biennale by the New York Times.

One of the founders of the new Shinto religion of Oomoto, Onisaburō Deguchi was a spiritualist, philosopher, and artist who devoted his life to the principle that God is the spirit which pervades the entire universe and that all religions stem from the same root. Proclaiming that “art is the mother of religion,” he produced calligraphy, paintings, and tanka poems, as well as dozens of films. In 1935, as part of the suppression of Oomoto by an increasingly militarist and ultranationalist Japanese government, he was jailed. During his detention, he conceived the idea of making tea bowls, and later made over 3,000 of these pieces, posthumously named “Yōwan,” in a period of only fifteen months.

Ben Eastham is editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism.