The Busan Museum of Contemporary Art (Busan MoCA) has unveiled its 2026 Children Exhibition, “The Rhinoceros and the Unicorn”. Running from March 21 to July 19, 2026, the exhibition occupies Gallery 2, 3, and Cinema Eulsuk. Far from being a simple showcase for kids, this project functions as an omnibus narrative that re-examines ancient belief systems—where good was rewarded and evil punished—within our complex, “post-truth” contemporary world.

The title itself serves as a powerful metaphor: the Rhinoceros represents the heavy, often ambiguous reality, while the Unicorn stands for the clear, coherent, yet illusory world of fantasy. Through the works of seven artists—including international figures like Magoz, Balint Zsako, Ayaka Fukano, and Jumaadi—the museum is transformed into a physical book where visitors “read” through movement and sensory rhythm rather than text.

We spoke with Choi Youngmin, Archivist and Curator at Busan MoCA, about the ethical responsibility of storytelling today.

The exhibition revisits narrative structures where good was rewarded and evil punished. In an era where causality often seems unstable, how can these older moral frameworks be meaningfully reinterpreted rather than nostalgically restored? 

This exhibition does not seek to restore or reinstate the moral structure of folktales. Rather, what interested us was precisely the fact that such structures no longer operate as self-evidently today. In folktales, the relationships between good and evil, truth and falsehood, reward and punishment are presented relatively clearly. In contemporary reality, however, those connections are often broken, delayed, or entangled. At that point, folktales become not simply a repository of moral lessons, but an old device through which we may reflect on the instability of the present world.

For that reason, the exhibition approaches folktales not as objects of nostalgia, but as structures that can be unsettled and questioned anew. Familiar stories do not function here as frameworks for restoring an older order, but as forms to be re-examined through contemporary sensibilities. In other words, what matters is not reviving old moral codes, but thinking together about why we still seem to need such structures, and what kinds of feeling and judgment remain when they no longer function intact.

The rhinoceros and the unicorn symbolize reality and fantasy. How does this metaphor resonate in a time when the boundaries between fact and fiction?especially through digital media?are increasingly blurred? 

The exhibition title, The Rhinoceros and the Unicorn, is less a metaphor that simply opposes reality and fantasy than a device for showing that the boundary between the two is not as solid as we tend to assume. A rhinoceros may be described as a real animal and a unicorn as an imaginary one, but what we call reality today is not always given to us in a transparent or stable way. Conversely, imagination or fiction is not merely an unreal realm detached from reality; it can also be a way of sensing and organizing reality itself.

The instability of the boundary between fact and fiction in digital environments is not irrelevant to this exhibition, but we did not want to address it primarily at the level of fact-checking or information verification. What mattered more to us was not only what is factual, but also what is remembered more intensely, what is more readily believed, and what kinds of images and narratives exert a pressure on us that may feel even stronger than reality itself. In that sense, the unicorn is not simply a symbol of unreality; at times, it may be a form of imagination that operates more powerfully, and more concretely, than the rhinoceros.

The exhibition extends into a publication, moving from spatial narrative to book form. How does this shift in medium reflect the exhibition’s broader idea of repetition, reinterpretation, and open-ended storytelling in our present time? 

In this exhibition, the book is not a supplementary device that explains or documents the exhibition. Rather, we considered it another narrative form placed alongside the exhibition itself. Since we wanted to conceive the entire gallery as a kind of “wordless picture book,” the extension into publication was not an after-the-fact summary, but an element built into the exhibition’s structure from the beginning. In the exhibition space, visitors move their bodies as they pass from one scene to another; in a book, by contrast, they can turn pages, pause, return, and rearrange. The same story is experienced as a sequence of movement in space, but in the book it is reconfigured through the rhythm of repetition and rereading.

This shift in medium shows that a story is never completed in a single form once and for all. Scenes encountered in the exhibition reopen in the book, and narratives encountered in the book reshape the memory of the exhibition. We understood this repetition not as simple duplication, but as a difference in interpretation. The form of the book was especially important because it allows each reader to reweave the story at their own pace. Today, we consume large amounts of already organized information and other people’s narratives at great speed, yet we have relatively few opportunities to reconstruct a narrative through our own experience and perception. In that sense, the book is not so much a medium that delivers a fixed conclusion as a form that allows the reader to pause, look again, and form connections of their own. The relationship between the exhibition and the publication, therefore, is not one of fixing meaning, but of revealing a structure in which the story continues in different forms and is read again.

How does the exhibition’s spatial design facilitate a “dual-level” engagement that respects the child’s sense of wonder without oversimplifying the adult’s sense of existential risk? 

The spatial design of this exhibition is not a dual structure divided into separate areas for children and adults. Rather, it is organized so that the same scene can be read differently from different eye levels. We used approximately 120 cm—often considered a child’s eye level—as an important reference point in dividing the colors and visual rhythm of the space. Because the height from which children see and the height from which adults see are in fact different, the elements that are grasped first and the way one enters the story can also differ within the same scene.

For that reason, the space was composed so that, for children, it would open up visual curiosity and narrative entry points, while for adults, the same scene would not close into a simple moral lesson but would instead leave room for gaps, unease, and ambiguity. Rather than resolving this difference through explanation, we wanted to allow visitors to move through the scenes at their own height and pace, adjusting the density of interpretation for themselves. In that sense, a child’s wonder and an adult’s anxiety are not separate emotions, but something that operates simultaneously within the same space from different points of view.

Given the transition from a physical space to a publication, how does the act of re-reading a book mirror the exhibition’s theme of the constant re-interpretation of “truth” in a post-truth world?

We would not want to explain this exhibition directly through the concept of “post-truth.” What mattered more to us was the fact that each repetition of a story slightly alters its meaning, and that the same scene can be read entirely differently when encountered again. The book is one of the clearest forms through which this structure of rereading becomes visible. It is not something one reads once and finishes; rather, it allows one to turn back, revisit earlier pages, and encounter an already familiar scene within a different context.

In that sense, rereading a book does not mean that truth does not exist, but that the process of arriving at truth is not linear. What interested us was not declaring what is ultimately right, but asking how interpretation changes as stories are repeated and displaced, and what kinds of sensory and ethical questions those differences leave with us. And yet, despite all this, I still think people continue to live with a desire for happiness, truth, kindness, and some sense of what is real. Of course, these may not be given to us as fixed answers. Still, in confused times, people often seem to search all the more earnestly for ways of understanding one another with generosity, and for some kind of principle that helps them hold on to the story of their own lives. The movement from exhibition to book is, in this sense, a way of experiencing once again—through the form of repetition and difference—that place where uncertainty and hope coexist.

The exhibition is on display at Busan MoCA (1191 Nakdongnam-ro, Saha-gu, Busan) until July 19, 2026

Elisa Cutullè