The (In)visible Display: Reconstituting Museum Experience Through Performance Pedagogy

In this article, I reconceptualize my understanding of Korean objects in terms of how they perform pedagogically within a context of an art museum in the United States. A pedagogical performance occurs when a contextual shift initiates a process of learning that exposes, examines, and critiques the conventional, pre-existing discourse of objects and cultures. Understanding the museum as a performative site, I describe my experiences in the Arts of Korea gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. By juxtaposing past and present and visible and invisible cultural elements, I play with the standards and assumptions of cultural display. Based on this exploration, I conceptualize an entangled, performative relationship between the museum setting, its objects, and the continuous exchange of subjectivities between and among different audiences from which new possibilities for museum education can emerge.