Tadao Ando’s Concrete Dome Unveiled at San Museum

Prime Highlights

Tadao Ando reveals permanent underground concrete dome at Museum SAN in Korea for Antony Gormley’s new exhibition.
Gormley’s “Drawing on Space” investigates the interaction between body, architecture, and environment.

Key Fact

A 25-meter-wide concrete dome with an oculus in the middle now contains a collection of Gormley sculptures at Museum SAN.
“Drawing on Space” includes 48 works ranging from drawings, prints, sculptures, and large-scale installations.

Key Background

Japanese architect Tadao Ando has worked with British sculptor Antony Gormley to launch a poignant underground pavilion named Ground at Museum SAN in Wonju, South Korea. The newly opened building is the museum’s first permanent building intervention for exhibiting the work of a solo artist and is the center of Gormley’s biggest Korean show to date.

The 25-meter-wide-diameter dome is beautifully hidden beneath a flower garden and made out of raw concrete. A single oculus at the top allows natural light to travel into the chamber in a serene reference to the spirituality behind ancient building designs. Visitors descend into the enveloping space where architecture, art, and nature come together to create a meditative atmosphere.

Seated within seven cast-iron figures of Gormley’s Blockworks series stand lined up behind curved glazed wall, facing the viewer with imposing figure. A solitary figure stands outside the edge of the dome, aligned accurately along the oculus. The balance between sculpture and light, and between unbroken continuity from inside to outside, adds weight to Gormley’s interest in how the human body inhabits and generates space.

Entitled “Drawing on Space,” the entire show occupies three of the museum’s gallery wings and comprises 48 of Gormley’s works—anything from dense, solid objects to filmy web-like creations. Among the selected are Liminal Field, a steel-coiled accumulation of hundreds of coils, and Orbit Field II, an installation which is labyrinthine and composed of thousands of rings in aluminum and can be traversed by visitors.

Gormley’s general question—how the figure of man comes into conjunction with its surroundings in space—is an insistently architectural one in Ando’s dome. This pairing pushes the museum’s endeavor to bring contemporary art and architectural vision together even further, as with the earlier installations in the James Turrell Pavilion. Ground, Museum SAN solidifies itself as a place of contemplative stillness where sculpture, building, and landscape converge poetically.