‘Ernesto Neto: Ba Ka Ba’ opens in seoul
The Seoul Museum of Art presents ‘Ernesto Neto: Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities,’ a new site-specific installation by the Brazilian artist that transforms the Korean museum’s Seosomun Main Branch lobby into a sensory environment. Commissioned as part of the 2025 SeMA Public Space Project, the woven artwork expands Ernesto Neto‘s longstanding interest in the relationships between body, space, and collective experience.
Ernesto Neto portrait | images courtesy SeMA, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
sema suspends colossal crocheted artworks
Ernesto Neto’s installation at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) is composed of expansive crochet structures woven from industrial cotton fabrics in shades of brown and pink. These colors, chosen to evoke tree trunks and night alongside flowers and day, establish a dialogue between natural rhythms and architectural structure. Suspended and filled with dried guava leaves and locally sourced tea leaves, the artist‘s forms invite a multi-sensory encounter that engages smell both texture together.
By occupying the museum’s lobby and adjacent open spaces, the work introduces an organic intervention into the building’s otherwise linear architecture. The flowing crochet forms generate a cyclical sense of space, suggesting continuity and transformation rather than fixed boundaries. Visitors move through and around the installation, encountering shifting relations between center and periphery, interior and exterior.
Ernesto Neto presents ‘Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities’ at the Seoul Museum of Art
the installation’s onomatopoeic title
The title ‘Ba Ka Ba’ functions as an onomatopoeic expression, its mirrored syllables referencing cycles and flows. This rhythm extends into the work’s conceptual framework: polarities such as body and space, sensation and thought, or self and other are not held apart but brought into dialogue. For Neto, these intersections remain central to his practice, recalling his ties to the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, which emphasized participation, sensation, and subjective experience.
These ideas are reimagined within Seoul’s contemporary urban context. The installation offers an open environment where visitors become part of the work itself and embody a condition of exchange and interrelation. The sensory components extend beyond the visual to affirm art’s role in daily life.
the installation fills the Seosomun Main Branch lobby with crochet structures
the work is filled with dried guava leaves and locally sourced tea leaves
brown and pink industrial cotton fabrics evoke tree trunks night flowers and day
the crocheted forms bring an organic intervention to the museum’s linear architecture
project info:
name: Ernesto Neto: Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities (Ba Ka Ba, uma dança das eternas polaridades)
artist: Ernesto Neto | @ernestonetoarte
museum: Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA)
location: 61, Deoksugung-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul, Korea
photography: © SeMA
The post ernesto neto suspends colossal crocheted installation within seoul museum of art appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.