Bauhaus (1919-1933) as an Art & Design educational institution had a great influence on the development of the 20th century art, architecture, textile, graphic, industrial design and typography. Bauhaus was aimed to reach the total work of art and operated to educate new artists who could bring social changes.
From the early stage of the Bauhaus, they explored the role and function of art that closely related to our daily life in modern technology civilization through various workshops such as metal, textile, design and architecture under each meister. Their experiment and instruction method was not just purposed to develop the individual’s creativity and ability, but also guided to reach a total art through workshops by members of the Bauhaus.
Particularly, they mainly dealt with dynamic role of stage as space of harmony among human, space and machine. For this, their study about ‘total theater’ as a playground for primary experimentation was proceeding from the beginning of the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus stage workshop was established by Walter Gropius in 1921 and it was led by Lothar Schreyer, director, until 1923 and taken over by Oskar Schlemmer, painter and choreographer, in 1929.
The leading role of the Bauhaus, such as Walter Gropius, Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Xanti Schawinsky, Paul Klee, Wasily Kandinsky experimented synthesis among human, space and machine not only in their own area, but also on the stage. They believed that their research about mechanical and abstract stage design, costume, doll, dance, humorous movement, light and sound could even make a change of the modern human body and mind. Thus, we could readily understand a characteristic of stage experiments at the Bauhaus that tried to develop a new idea of modern man collectively by Johannes Itten's word “Play becomes work, work becomes party, party becomes play.”
Human Space Machine-Stage Experiments at the Bauhaus was planned in collaboration with the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation since 2012. This exhibition deals with the Bauhaus’s experiments about new type of human response to changes of a new era, from World War I to early 1930s. Exhibitions about architecture and design of the Bauhaus were often shown, but this is the first full-scale exhibition ever to focus on stage experiments in Asia. The exhibition is organized in seven sections; Section one ‘Body of Harmonization’, section two ‘Atmospherical Devices’, section three ‘Constructivist Figuration’, section four ‘Eccentric stage mechanisims’, section five ‘Sculptural choreographies’, section six ‘Total theaters’, section seven ‘Programmed collectives’. In this exhibition organization make possible to recognize characteristic of the Bauhaus as an arena of creative and experimental idea toward multiple approach of art.
