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.
SONG Kicheol
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관리자 2020-09-05 15:34
Born 1982 in Busan, Korea
Lives in Busan
SONG Kicheol, Deeply dark, Far distant from the dim, 2020, Single channel video, color, sound, 4min 20sec, mixed media, variable dimensions
SONG Kicheol’s practice derives from two references: the masochistic and the lumpenproletariat, two ideas fused with both disturbing and liberating meanings. The idea of logic and the meaning of words is the “power” structured in the neoliberal world. Power and order are constructed through the law and symbols, but according to the artist, it is the lumpen that discards the order. The lumpen is for SONG Kicheol a state of exclusion that opens up to emancipation. Masochism is a method of self-denial before achieving the lumpen when desire reflects the other people’s ones like a mirror. But, for not belonging to any desires or anywhere, you can create a new context and dismantle the status quo. If we look at the figure of Julian Assange, like the artist is explaining, we can understand self-violence (the act of giving access to some public forbidden information, at the price of having to be condemned for that) as an act enabling emancipation: free circulation of information. In this meaning, one obtains his or her true freedom and break the authority by betraying the “desire.”
Using performance and installation-based works, the artist is engaged in mixing medium to overcome boundaries as an attempt to separate us from the laws that govern our lives. His installation for the Busan Biennale 2016 Already Peacefully Existing Here as Always was a strong manifestation of the non embodyment of frontier-barriers, recalling the fact that we are not living in a totally free world. For his installation at Busan Biennale 2020, entitled Deeply dark, Far distant from the dim, we see a wall painting representing a truck full of chairs and truncated bodies in such a way that both are dependent from each other, and staked if all objects to maximize transport costs. The bodies occupy the space between the chairs, then reduced to holes, since we observe they have fallen apart, becoming beats, a mixture of half-human and half beast, born from the neoliberal world we live in.