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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.

Theme

Busan Biennale 2008

Expenditure

'Expenditure'

Expenditure is a concept that originated from the thought of the French philosopher, Georges Bataille. Georges Bataille is a leading philosopher on post-structuralism and post-modern cultural theories and is being reevaluated as one of the most unique and remarkable thinkers in the 20th century.

Expenditure is a concept opposite to production, moderation, accumulation, acquisition, system, control, etc. and is interpreted as consumption, discharge, exhaustion. It also means extravagance and reckless spending. Bataille believed that human civilization and culture could be maintained through the meaningless process of discharging, consuming, disintegrating such accumulation and production. In this regard, Bataille's expenditure is at the antipode of goal-oriented and production-centered values and in itself a major cultural activity and driver. Furthermore, Bataille's expenditure has positive meanings such as presents, unconditional giving and benefits, distribution of possessions, and relaxation of tension and it is directly linked to the meaning of artistic activity. In this aspect, Bataille reckoned that the highest and holiest values of religion, human body discharging wastes, eroticism, crime and war, and art could all meet in the same dimension.

Expenditure and similar concepts like consumption, and discharge are not just concepts in philosophy and sociology. It can also serve as a significant approach of art criticism that can analyze artworks or reinterpret the entire contemporary art history. Bataille had already employed relevant theories as specific theories for artworks, like surrealism. After the 1980s, several leading post-modern critical theorists expanded the concept of informe, which is a concept similar to expenditure, into a theory reinterpreting the entire contemporary art. This approach is aesthetics pursuing degenderization, decategorization, eroticism, disintegration of reproductive order, aesthetics of entropic degeneration, grotesqueness, disintegration of artwork concepts, disruption of subjects, others, collapse ofconfrontational structure between the center and the peripheral, an end to the confrontation between the conservative and the radical aesthetics, as well as the aesthetics of transgression. This aesthetics constitutes the most important trend in today's world art and the Busan Biennale will broadly highlight the art following this trend.

In addition, the concept of expenditure well represents the characteristics of cutting-edge cyber culture, as well as those of contemporary art. Moreover, expenditure is a self-reflective, self-destructive concept that challenges the symbolic system of culture and criticizes the structure of culture itself. Thus, this concept will entail a strong intention of the Biennale reflecting upon the basic production conditions of culture and art and their philosophical foundation, rather than contributing to fantasy about a new type of art, cultural fetishism. It will also shift the focus of the Biennale from the production-centered perspective, like the production of newer types of art and more cultural events, to the disintegration, consumption and disappearance of culturally symbolic values. It turns out that this aspect is actually a significant driver of culture and a source of values.

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