As technology mimics human language and art increasingly turns into spectacle, where should art head next? Roh Soh-yeong, founding director of the museum Art Center Nabi and General Director of the International Symposium on Electronic Art 2025 (ISEA), responds with a profound concept: Dong-Dong (憧憧, “Dong-Dong: Creators' Universe”). Rooted in the I Ching (易經 a philosophy of change and harmony), Dong-Dong draws from the line “Dong-Dong-Wang-Rae, Bung-Jong-E-Sa憧憧往來 朋從爾思,” which evokes a state of yearning and mutual resonance, where kindred spirits move toward and with each other.

The I Ching, also known as The Book of Changes, is one of the oldest Chinese classical texts. It combines a divination system with deep philosophical insight, emphasising change, duality, and harmony. It has influenced East Asian thinking on ethics, aesthetics, and cosmology. Dong-Dong is more than synchronised motion; it is a relational vibration, an aesthetic-political state of becoming together. Roh also describes it as 'a heart that draws like a child, a heart full of fluttering anticipation'—a spirit of innocent longing and joyful expectancy. In Roh’s words, it signifies a shared presence that counters an era dominated by materialism, information flows and accelerated efficiency. Roh spoke to STIR about ISEA 2025 and the thematic focus of the symposium.

Lee Daehyung: You are now leading ISEA 2025 as its General Director. What critical concerns are at the heart of this undertaking, beyond a festival or exhibition?

Roh Soh-yeong: Technology is no longer neutral. It consumes electricity and devours the world. Many of the artistic practices we admire are, in fact, energy-intensive processes. AI, data, algorithms and servers all underpin our civilisation while simultaneously placing it at risk. So I ask: is the art we consume worth the environmental and ethical cost it entails?

Technology may be a gift, but like Prometheus, who gave fire to humanity and suffered divine punishment, we too are bound by responsibility. Today’s tech holds immense promise but demands an equally immense sense of accountability — ecological, ethical, existential.

Daehyung: Your remarks reflect a critique of how the fusion of art and tech is often reduced to spectacle.

Soh-yeong: Exactly. Technology once served to interpret and expand the world. Today, it dominates our gaze more than it stimulates our senses. When art meets technology, it shouldn’t merely dazzle—it should ask: why do we create? What are we reflecting on?

Art must return to philosophy. Art that loses its dignity, its resonance with human presence, becomes hollower than technology itself.

Daehyung: Is this why you chose Dong-Dong as the curatorial theme?

Soh-yeong: Indeed. Dong-Dong is not just about movement. It is about attunement and resonance. In the I Ching, it implies coming and going in mutual longing. “Creators' Universe” extends this resonance beyond individuals into an intersubjective cosmos of creation.

In a world [that is] fractured and fragmented, art must become a site of shared presence. Community, after all, is not built on interests but on understanding and trust; not on plans but on attunement and emotions. Art can be a potent catalyst to this order.

Daehyung: You're calling for an integrative consciousness that transcends the dichotomy between intellect and spirit.

Soh-yeong: Precisely. Western modernity dissected the world through intellect and expelled spirit in the process. In contrast, East Asian traditions never severed the link between knowledge and resonance. Classification was connection. Perception was participation.

I believe the world today must return to such integrated ways of thinking, to a sensibility of coexistence. Art can be the guide of this civilisational turn.

Daehyung: You mentioned the dinner table as an artistic metaphor. What does it signify in the context of an exhibition?

Soh-yeong: The table is the oldest form of art. It is composition, rhythm, story and hospitality. A thoughtfully prepared table speaks deeper than words. If exhibitions design perception, the table opens emotion. I believe art should abandon spectacle and return to the wisdom of the table, where countless unnamed artists have encoded their grammars of sensitivity.

Daehyung: In tech-based exhibitions, centring the table seems radically counterintuitive.

Soh-yeong: And yet it is profoundly primal. Exhibitions must become acts of welcome. If art is essentially about hospitality, then curation should return to the ethics of gathering. When we eat, sing, laugh and weep together, an unspoken artistic exchange unfolds—one that no screen can replicate.

Daehyung: You said innovation isn’t about novelty, but about value. Could you elaborate?

Soh-yeong: Innovation is not just technological progress. It is a new mode of sensing meaning. Sometimes, reviving the forgotten is more radical than inventing the new. Collaboration, sharing, trust — these age-old values need new contexts. I call it the ethical ecology of art. In this regard, Korea retains a rare sensibility that must be nurtured.

Daehyung: Is this also the ethos behind the East Meets East project?

Soh-yeong: Absolutely. It is not just an East-West dialogue. It is a civilisational practice. Diverse "Easts" — Asia, the Middle East, Africa — gather to rethink civilisation around shared values: hospitality, relation and spiritual depth. I envision a landscape where philosophy, art, technology, myth and pedagogy sketch a new topography.

Daehyung: What is the one message you hope visitors will carry from ISEA 2025?

Soh-yeong: “Let us share a meal.” That’s all. In asking, giving, weeping and dancing together, I believe we plant the seeds of a new civilisation. Art is a question, a love, a form of welcome. No matter how sophisticated technology becomes, what truly moves people is still a warm meal and a kind word. ISEA 2025 is that table. The exhibition is not a space — it is a state of heart. Dong-Dong is its new language.

Postscript

This interview was a eureka moment. Though I have known Roh Soh-yeong for many years, here I witnessed her as a philosopher-poet with a shamanic intuition. I was no longer just an interviewer; I became a witness.

Her opening line — "technology eats electricity" — felt like a declaration. Her reference to Prometheus suggested not only a mythic parallel but a moral position: technology is no longer a tool but a structure and we have lost the language to decode it.

Yet the deepest resonance came from her metaphor of the table. It is the most ancient art form and the most enduring technique of welcome. Not light or screen, but a single bowl of food, a single gesture of care, may hold the power to move. She proposed turning the exhibition space into a giant shared table. It sounded unfamiliar, but it made profound sense.

After our conversation, I revisited the galleries in my mind. So many claim to foster interaction, yet offer only QR codes at their entrances. That is not true hospitality. What Roh called "Dong-Dong" is not a technological connection but an emotional co-presence.

Her East Meets East project, too, is not a geopolitical gesture but a civilisational repositioning. What Western modernity dismissed — spirit, intuition, relation, community — are now the very preconditions of a livable future. Near the end of the interview, she said: "When you're full of love, you can't help but create. Like writing a love letter." In that line, I heard the origin of all art.

Art, then, is not merely a return to the language of love, but a reawakening of the senses to the invisible threads that bind us. As Roh suggests, art is not just a question—it is a pulse felt before it is understood, a gesture that precedes meaning. Henceforth, I will enter every exhibition as one enters a sacred threshold, wondering: "Does this space let us feel something real—and remind us of what it means to be human, together?"

ISEA 2025 may well become such a threshold—not a site of futuristic proclamation, but a terrain of mutual becoming. It invites not answers, but attunements; not declarations, but quiet metamorphoses. The future it gestures toward is not engineered, but composed—in trembling proximity to the other.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.

ISEA 2025 runs from May 23 - 29, 2025 in Seoul, South Korea.