Busan Biennale
The Busan Biennale is a biannual international contemporary art show that integrated three different art events held in the city in 1998: the Busan Youth Biennale, the first biennale of Korea that was voluntarily organized by local artists in 1981; the Sea Art Festival, an environmental art festival launched in 1987 with the sea serving as a backdrop; and the Busan International Outdoor Sculpture Symposium that was first held in 1991. The biennale was previously called the Pusan International Contemporary Art Festival (PICAF) before it launched.
The biennale has its own unique attribute in that it was formed not out of any political logic or need but rather the pure force of local Busan artists’ will and their voluntary participation. Even to this day their interest in Busan's culture and its experimental nature has been the key foundation for shaping the biennale’s identity.
This biennale is the only one like it in the world that was established through an integration of three types of art events such as a Contemporary Art Exhibition, Sculpture Symposium, and Sea Art Festival. The Sculpture Symposium in particular was deemed to be a successful public art event, the results of which were installed throughout the city and dedicated to revitalizing cultural communication with citizens. The networks formed through the event have assumed a crucial role in introducing and expanding domestic art overseas and leading the development of local culture for globalized cultural communication. Founded 38 years ago, the biennale aims to popularize contemporary art and achieve art in everyday life by providing a platform for interchanging experimental contemporary art.
Sorawit Songsataya
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BB2024 2024-11-29 17:51
Two Bridges with 7 Notes and 42 Strings, 2024, rattan, seashell, dried fish, cuttlebone, stone, bowls and baskets, dimension variable.
Shoulders of Giants, 2023, single-channel digital video, sound 45min. 5sec.
Two Bridges with 7 Notes and 42 Strings (2024) draws together sonic and olfactory memories associated with the artist's childhood upbringing to reimagine a dissolving instrument where performance and the act of listening require a different mode of navigation. Informed by the stringed musical instrument called Khim (ขิม), the artist gathered locally at Busan markets and shorelines shells of crustaceous beings and stones to form the bridge components of the Khim, along with thin rattan vines sourced in Thailand as its strings. Bringing together materials that closely resemble an olfactory memory of a now-defunct small-scale fish sauce factory run by the artist's granduncle, the installation misplaces sources and locations to create a makeshift place where sonic memories can re-emerge and to crystallise their slow disintegration.
Shoulders of Giants (2023) follows transit routes and geological localities through the Central Otago landscape in the South Island of New Zealand. The work combines aerial drone footage of schist and limestone from the region with digitally produced audio by the artist. Polarised light microscopic images of the stone mineral composites commingle with 3D animations and photogrammetric sequences of the stone outcrops. Symbols of Thai vowels and digital watercolours grow and peel off from the footage of the land, conveying an attempt to hear and commune with the land. Language and writing here explore the ancient ties between humans and stone––the soft and hard bodies where the archival and transcription are in transference. As a whole, Shoulders of Giants considers the possibilities and limitations of conversing with the land through sound.
Ranad, 2024, Taranaki andesite, Ōamaru stone, onyx, dried plants, Taranaki andesite carving by Donald Buglass, 53x152x34cm.
Ranad (2024) references the Thai wooden percussion instrument Ranad (ระนาด) and repurposes Taranaki andesite and Ōamaru stone from places the artist has lived in Aotearoa. Here, the relationship to places and traditions remains both far and near. Employing hand-carving and high-pressure waterjet CNC (Computer Numerical Control) routing, the instrument proposes the idea of hearing and listening differently––that a stone might emanate a sound. Ranad considers inaudibility and its relation to duration and memory. The work explores and troubles the routes by which ephemeral vibrations and utterances are translated into visual form.
Body Language, 2024, acrylic, sedge mats, rattan, recycled paper, digital print, 72x325x5cm, 110x560x5cm.
Body Language (2024) offers a form of graphic notation, with sedge mats as staves on which handmade paper, plant matter, and digitally rendered marks build towards a score. The digitally rendered patterns printed on the handmade papers are stills of sound animation converted from a digitised wax cylinder recording of Kham Hom (Sweet Words), performed by a Siamese (Thai) theatre group visiting Berlin, Germany, in September 1900. The sedge mats, woven by a group of women from the artist's paternal grandmother’s hometown of Chanthaburi, explore weaving as a tracing method as the craft got introduced to the province through a group of Vietnamese Catholic nuns who were thought to have been taught by Portuguese missionaries. The sedge mats as staves convey the unarchived family lineage and an attempt to reconnect a fragmented migratory history. By borrowing the form of graphic notation, Body Language unsettles Western representations of music as a fixed code on a two-dimensional surface. The work suggests the possibility of understanding lineage and history through a woven sonic embodiment that is not necessarily reproducible.
