Italian envoy pitches Korea on heritage-restoration cooperation at GBF

Italian Ambassador to Korea Emilia Gatto urged closer cooperation with Korea in a field where she said Italian know-how is built on both deep tradition and advanced technology.

Gatto was speaking at the sixth session of the 9th Global Biz Forum hosted by The Korea Herald and Herald Business at ArtCube2R2 gallery in Seoul. The session comprised two special remarks and a lecture on contemporary art.

"It is not enough to keep artworks inside museums," Gatto said. "Continuous care is needed." The surroundings of museums must also be beautiful, she added, highlighting the strict rules Italy enforces on landscape and urban architecture "because beauty is often not the same as comfort."

"Italy is a living laboratory for heritage science and a world leader in restoration. Italian restoration is a science where many fields work together," she said, describing a practice that combines portable X-ray fluorescence, scanning infrared reflectography, laser cleaning, nanotechnology, photogrammetry, 3D laser scanning and digital twins. The work is anchored at institutions such as the Istituto Centrale del Restauro in Rome and the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, with sensors at sites such as the Colosseum and Pompeii that monitor environmental and vibration data.

Gatto also noted the memorandum of understanding on bilateral heritage preservation signed during Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's visit to Seoul in January. Italy, she says, stands ready to deepen cooperation with Korea in the field.

Art as leadership training

Hong Ji-sook, CEO of Art Token, framed the encounter between artists and executives as a leadership exercise rather than a cultural diversion.

"The most important capacity for a CEO and a leader is not just reading numbers, seeing markets or making decisions," Hong said. "It is the sense that detects unseen possibilities first. Art awakens that sense."

Hong compared the artist's process — building order in the absence of given answers, and finding new language inside uncertainty — to entrepreneurship. Both, she said, involve imagining markets that do not yet exist, structuring invisible value and producing proposals capable of moving people. She called art "the most refined source of inspiration for CEOs and the most essential training ground for leadership."

"Art Token will continue to position art as a meeting point for business, society and the future of the city, while expanding Korean art's reach through digital, intellectual property and global content channels," she said.

A century of new discovery

Artist Qwon Sun-wang delivered the session's special lecture, framing contemporary art as a kindred discipline to running a company. Contemporary art "breaks with the past, moves toward the new, is avant-garde and different from existing art," he said.

"What the end of resistance leads to is new discovery," Qwon said, walking the audience through a century of art history that began with Dadaism's break from rationalism after World War I.

He returned repeatedly to the idea that the contemporary artist's job is to find what others overlook. Marcel Duchamp's 1917 "Fountain," a urinal turned on its side, was radical because no one else had thought to look at the object that way. Maurizio Cattelan's banana taped to a wall, Jeff Koons' balloon-dog sculptures and the Korean artist Lee Bae's charcoal works earned their place in the canon for the same reason.

"Finding things in trivial surroundings, that is the great discovery. That is contemporary art," he said.

Qwon, who holds a doctorate in fine arts from Hongik University, has worked across printmaking, Western painting and theater-film studies. He was introduced as a recipient of the US President's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024.

The 9th Global Biz Forum runs weekly through July 8.