The calm that settles over you when you're alone in a space with just a few people drifting past. That's why I love museums in the early morning, but in New York, it's genuinely hard to find. Most people I've met here say the hardest part of living in New York is the sheer number of people and the noise that never stops. But member hours make the empty museum possible.

Before arriving, I decided to get memberships and live inside museums every day, so I joined MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney, plus a student membership with the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). I ended up going about once or twice a week, not every day as planned, but I came to feel that joining was absolutely the right call. Beyond a partial tax deduction, the basic perks (free admission, guest tickets, design shop discounts) were attractive. But the real jewel of any membership is the member hour or member night: a time when the museum opens only for members, and you can finally stand alone in front of works that are ordinarily too crowded to approach.

MoMA set chairs in the terrace sculpture garden during member evenings and handed out wine or beer. Whitney's member nights brought in a DJ. You could dance on the ground floor, warm up with cocktails, then wander upstairs to look at art. Those hours were perfect for unexpected encounters. At MoMA, I spent a long time talking with an elegantly dressed older woman from Iran, listening as she shared her life and philosophy. At Whitney, I fell into a conversation with someone who layered their drawing on over mine to make a collaborative work, and we ended up sneaking our piece into the bathroom to exhibit.

The Guggenheim had no such events, but its quiet during member hours was enough of a gift. Spending about two hours drifting through every corner of the building with the audio guide, crossing paths with just a few elderly visitors and two or three young people, was so sweet. That day I discovered the reading room for the first time, a space where you can read Cecilia Vicuña's poetry collections and make small works of your own, and a staff member there told me: "Working at the Guggenheim is wonderful, as long as you can go home and cry from the crowds and then show up the next morning as if nothing happened." This confirmed that a moment like that one is never to be taken for granted.

Seoul's art scene is growing, but is there a museum there yet that makes you want to join as a member? For me, the answer is still mostly no — partly because I can't think of many large-scale private museums worth returning to multiple times a year. But that also means there's something to look forward to: the pleasure of waiting to see what will emerge. At the Art Institute of Chicago, I discovered a program called the Modern and Contemporary Reciprocal Membership, which linked contemporary museums across the country under a single membership. Joining gave you free admission at every institution on the list, nationwide. I wondered whether something like this exists in Korea. And if not, whether bringing several museums together under a shared program might be worth trying.

What is a museum actually for? What conditions should it meet? Every American institution I visited was working out its own answer. One that I thought got it most right was MCA Chicago. The exhibitions were strong, but what I remember most is that MCA, quite apart from its beautiful building, knew how to open different parts of its space to visitors and the public. Looking at the floor map, I noticed something listed as a "Quiet Room" and asked at the front desk what it was. The answer: a space anyone can use to rest and reflect, pray, or breastfeed. No conditions, no time limit under thirty minutes; just let the counter know if you'll stay longer. Inside, a simple sink for prayer or nursing and a qibla pointing toward Mecca. I spent ten minutes there. Upstairs from the first-floor café, past a staircase, was "The Commons," an area with tables and chairs where anyone could sit and work freely without buying anything. I watched groups of friends and children use it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I thought of all the times I'd had to move to a café to write in a museum and how, in Korea, the café has become everyone's living room and study room because free, truly accessible space is so rare. It was a pleasant kind of shock.

Other spaces stayed with me too: the cushioned sofas with backrests placed throughout Dia: Beacon's galleries, the light-filled café terrace at the Brooklyn Museum, the circular sofa in front of an opaque window at the center of one of the second-floor galleries. The New Museum gave its entire fifth floor to a rest space and lookout with tables and chairs, open to everyone. I sat there for a while and just looked out. How convenient, and how good, that a museum can give you a place to rest and return to the work without ever making you leave the building. Not everyone can stay focused at high concentration for two hours. Rest is part of spatial design. And when a space is worth coming back to, interest in the art inside tends to rise with it. A museum has to know how to be a public space, like a library. A place where you can develop an aesthetic sensibility without spending much money, where people can talk to strangers and learn something. MCA was fully accessible for visitors with disabilities, and offered free admission to caregivers and disabled visitors. That too should be said.

I was surprised to hear recently that one gallery in Seoul had declared itself a no-kids zone and started charging admission. At Sean Kelly Gallery I may have been watched with unwarranted suspicion, but at least viewing Marina Abramović's work didn't cost me anything. In New York in 2022, visiting galleries was one of my greatest pleasures, and a different kind of pleasure from museums. Major works by Barbara Kruger, Nam June Paik, and Damien Hirst flow into New York alongside Hong Kong, Paris, and London. At galleries here, you could walk in off the street and stand in front of them. Just walk in, and it's free. The galleries that left the deepest impression were Howard Greenberg, David Zwirner, Pace, and Gagosian. Each had a clearly defined character.

Howard Greenberg is a photography-specialist gallery representing over eighty artists, including Vivian Maier. On my visit, they were showing A Female Gaze — twentieth-century street photography by American women artists. In one corner, you could browse and purchase catalogs they'd published for the exhibitions. Publishing clearly functions as a second program alongside their commercial work.

On both my visits, David Zwirner showed work with a strong feminist dimension. In February: a group show organized around Toni Morrison's The Black Book, gathering artworks related to Morrison's lifelong project of mapping Black women's self-discovery. In July: new work by Barbara Kruger, fresh from her major MoMA commission. What impressed me about the first show was its literary curatorial logic; what struck me about the second was how the overlapping sounds of large-scale video and sound installations filled the entire gallery with a strangely atmospheric feeling.

Pace Gallery occupies an entire building in Chelsea. Exhibitions across five floors, each with a different subject, plus a library open to visitors that I still think about.

Gagosian, which I returned to three times, consistently presented large-scale works by Hirst, Paik, and Michael Heizer with absolute command of scale and negative space; the kind that communicates awe and intimidation at the same time. During the Heizer show, a single enormous work filled an entire room. I visited both Chelsea locations on each trip and left inspired every time.

Specialists in every department staff these galleries: people who know exactly how to stage, install, and sell work at the highest level, and the visual pleasure was constant. What also struck me was the low barrier to entry: spaces funded entirely by sales to wealthy collectors, yet open to anyone who walks in. Cool in summer, warm in winter. I kept finding artists I didn't know yet. And I found myself thinking it might be interesting to work somewhere like this.

Time and energy are finite, so every visit required choices. Museums are enormous. Trying to see everything in a day is almost always overreach. I tried to prioritize works I could actually experience and that required physical presence. Dalí's The Persistence of Memory was smaller than I expected, and I suspected I could encounter it more fully on a screen. So I moved past them and spent as long as I could in front of Monet's water lilies, Yves Klein's blue works, and Mark Rothko's color fields. Käthe Kollwitz is an exception to the screen-vs-presence rule: small, but the work's spiritual quality in person is completely different from a print.

Dia: Beacon holds an enormous range of land art and large-scale installation in a converted factory more than ninety minutes north of Grand Central. Natural light illuminates everything, so each gallery's mood shifts with the sun's angle. Moving through works spaced generously in wide rooms, I'd start to feel tired and then descend underground to walk inside a Richard Serra sculpture, or stand inside Dan Flavin's vast blue light installation, or drift through the video works, and suddenly feel something close to a runner's high: the disorientation that arrives when sustained attention tips into something else entirely. I wandered the museum in that state.

At the Rubell Museum in Miami, I saw Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room: Let's Survive Forever (2017). On top of the museum's $25 admission, the mirror room cost an additional $10 for five minutes. I paid without hesitating. Spheres suspended mid-air, mirrors reflecting mirrors, a view expanding into infinity. Kusama transformed her concept of the infinite into something you could physically enter and inhabit. In a work that has aged beautifully over time, five minutes felt like fifty seconds.

At The Shed, I experienced Tomás Saraceno's commission Free the Air. After checking our belongings, we rode an elevator up and carefully found our places on a tightly woven filament net (an artificial spiderweb) suspended in space. We lay looking up into a fog-filled ceiling. As the room slowly darkened, for ten minutes we were surrounded by sounds, movements, and vibrations I'd never encountered, floating just above the floor, briefly becoming something else. What moved me beyond the experience itself was the sheer organizational and technical capacity required to make it happen—and the fact that the lower-level version was designed to be fully accessible. If you've ever dreamed of creating work or spaces that pull viewers into a particular state, and briefly take their phones away, this piece is worth researching further.

Art speaks to what we can't hold. But we also need what we can hold. Deepening a visitor's experience goes beyond offering a photograph to take home. It can leave something that resonates long after they leave. I kept being drawn, again and again, to the examples in the New York art scene that had already worked through those questions.

Neue Galerie — Woman in Gold alone is reason enough to visit. The collection includes Klimt, Egon Schiele, and other German and Austrian works. The ground-floor Café Sabarsky serves Austrian-style cakes, coffee, and light meals. Both the museum and the café are among my favorite Upper East Side spaces.

International Center of Photography (ICP) — near Chinatown, reliably showing strong photography exhibitions. The gift shop's selection of photography books is worth browsing. They also run public programs and classes — if you're in New York for an extended stay, worth looking into.

By interest: History lovers — American Museum of Natural History. Design — Cooper Hewitt and the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). New York history — Museum of the City of New York. Architecture — Center for Architecture (AIA). Fashion — The Museum at FIT. Classical and medieval art — Frick Collection and The Met Cloisters.

Beyond New York: Portland Art Museum, MCA Chicago, Rubell Museum Miami, The Bass. Each city's contemporary institutions have strong collections and rotating exhibitions. If you travel during an exchange semester, check the museums wherever you land.

For books and publications: downtown has Karma Books, Bungee Space, and Mast Books—all focused on art publications, all with an independent bookshop feel. McNally Jackson in SoHo, Casa Magazine in the West Village, and Iconic Magazine on the Bowery each stock publications from across the world.

If you can only pick one of the four major New York museums, I'd choose MoMA for its sheer breadth of collection. Choose the Guggenheim if you want to experience the architecture and that unusual spiral descent. Whitney for American contemporary art specifically. The Metropolitan Museum if "museum" in the fullest sense — artifacts, objects, history alongside art is what you're after. For gallery and museum news, start with Artforum, ArtReview, and Hyperallergic.