For some, university life is remembered through festivals and club rooms. For others, it survives as long hours spent in libraries surrounded by tablet PCs and employment preparation books. Even under the same label of “college student,” different generations experienced entirely different campuses, shaped by changing social realities and shifting anxieties.
Seoul Museum of Life History in Nowon-gu, Seoul, which has long documented the everyday lives of ordinary citizens, now turns its attention to university campuses once filled with youth and collective memory. Located inside a renovated former northern judicial complex building, the museum examines hidden layers of Seoul’s modern history through everyday artifacts touched by ordinary lives.
The special exhibition “At University, We,” which opened on May 15 and runs through September 27, focuses on the transformation of Korean university culture from the 1970s to the present day. Tracing student clubs, festivals, classroom culture, and the growing pressure of employment preparation, the exhibition creates a space where generations shaped by different eras can share memories and discover points of connection.
As visitors follow the exhibition’s chronological flow, the shifting priorities of campus life gradually emerge. The romantic atmosphere of the 1970s, represented by acoustic guitars, student taverns, and coffee houses, gave way in the 1980s to student activism, solidarity-driven festivals, and traditional folk club culture.
By the 1990s, university districts increasingly transformed into commercialized spaces. Thick major textbooks slowly disappeared from classrooms, replaced by student ID cards embedded with banking functions and the latest electronic devices.
Attitudes toward entering society also changed dramatically. Earlier generations prepared for employment by casually flipping through career guidebooks, while today’s students carry the weight of extracurricular certificates and language exam textbooks stacked around them. Graduation ceremonies, once noisy family celebrations, have gradually become quieter occasions where friends gather simply to leave behind commemorative snapshots.
To help visitors physically experience these transformations, the exhibition space recreates past campuses through immersive sets and participatory installations. Visitors walk through reconstructed club rooms, old-style cafés, and libraries, indirectly breathing in the atmosphere of earlier decades.
Interactive experiences include photo zones inspired by water-balloon festivals, activities where visitors can create their own class schedules, and spaces for designing graduation banners.
Standing before worn handwritten student IDs and notebooks filled with handwritten notes evokes nostalgia for earlier generations. Meanwhile, displays reflecting the intense employment pressure facing today’s students create a different emotional response, blending sympathy with encouragement.
Today, universities are increasingly perceived less as spaces for intellectual curiosity or youthful romance and more as gateways that must be passed in order to secure employment. Rather than simply reminiscing about the past, the exhibition ultimately raises questions about how universities might recover their original meaning as places of learning and growth.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
Copyright ⓒ 뉴스컬처 무단 전재 및 재배포 금지
