Horim Museum explores the ancient Korean view of time as a cycle

Time did not always move in a straight line. A special exhibition at Seoul’s Horim Museum examines how Korea’s ancestors understood time as a cycle reflected in daily life, the seasons, nature and the universe.

The exhibition, titled “Time,” opens at the museum’s Sinsa branch in Gangnam District. It takes its starting point from a passage in the 1804 publication “Annotated Thousand Character Classic,” which describes space as the four directions and time as the past and present. Together, they form the universe, or the world people inhabit.

Its most distinctive feature is the inclusion of contemporary artworks connected to each section’s theme. Visitors can therefore see how older ideas about time appear in art today.

The first section, “Cycle: Time That Returns,” explores recurring patterns such as the return of each day and the four seasons as they circle through the year. The exhibition presents these ideas as a contrast to the modern assumption that time naturally flows from the past to the present and then into the future.

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When the inside of heaven and earth is described in terms of space, it becomes the four directions, and when described in terms of time, the past and present become the universe.