The Future of Arts and City
A Policy Review of SAFT 2025
"The Future of Arts and the City, Talked Together in Seoul"_ A Policy Review of SAFT 2025
SFAC Issue Paper Culture+Policy Vol. 2025-11
Published on 13th November 2025
Written by Hae-Bo KIM (Advising Director of Policy & Strategy Division, SFAC)
<Table of Contents>
1. A Global Conversation in Seoul on the Future of Arts and the City
2. Accelerating Ai (Artificial intelligence) and Charting AI (Artistic Insight)
3. ‘Making City of Arts’ Central to Seoul-ness Through Long-Term Relationships
4. Future Strategies for Turning Locality into a Global Urban Attraction
5. SAFT — Weaving the Future Through People’s Conversations
The full article is downloadable here.
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On 4 November 2025, the Seoul·Arts·Future Talks (SAFT) 2025 was held successfully at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul. SAFT 2025 (www.saft.kr) is a new global forum initiated by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture (SFAC), inviting leading experts from Korea and around the world to discuss contemporary issues in arts, culture, technology, the city, and policy — from Seoul, through the lens of Seoul-ness, and to co-create emerging global cultural trends and discourse. Despite spanning a wide spectrum—from avant-garde arts to state-of-the-art artificial intelligence—the conversations remained remarkably profound, attracting an audience of more than 600 participants who stayed engaged until the end.
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When globally active cultural leaders gather in Seoul and inspire one another’s next steps, that becomes the seed of new cultural flows. SAFT seeks to become a global cultural-discourse platform shaped around “Seoul-ness.” Every late autumn, SAFT hopes to welcome people from across the world to Seoul—to talk, imagine, and anticipate the coming spring together. SAFT!
