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.
HEO Chanmi
Read 1,461
관리자 2020-09-05 13:12
Born 1991 in Busan, South Korea
Lives in Busan
HEO Chanmi, Daily Walking Rehearsals_rooftop-sky & roof-sea, 2020, Gouache on Paper, twigs, variable dimensions
There is a place for the unapproved, evicted, forgotten, and vanished in works of HEO Chanmi. Starting from her personal experience and expanding out into a social context, in her process, she fixates what she has encountered on the canvas in a quiet tone, like writing down a personal diary. However, it doesn’t actually seem like a diary, which is usually event-centric, but like a series of everyday happenings too trivial to be captured in a concrete form. In this respect, as an attempt to understand the world surrounding her, she engages with materials that she finds, and turns them into tools for making art works. Starting from the matter of selecting a tool for painting, her concerns stretch out to the matter of the images she creates with the tool. She, for example, starts to work by unfolding a paper that she was given, and then fills out the paper with random, unappreciated things that she found while roaming around the area where she started unfolding the paper.
The artist uses these tools to cling to things that will soon fade from memory, even though it works only for a short time. In the work Samilgongsa (2019, Space Clip, Busan), she brings “Samil Corporation” back to life, an organization which was located where the Busan Regional Military Manpower Administration is now located in the Mangmi area. Its name, “Samilgongsa,” was used to hide the presence of the Defense Security Command Busan branch from the public, and it also made it possible to commit brutal violence against citizens under the name of national security. The artist tries to confront this historical background, recalling its memories and resisting their disappearance by using the blanket she used for covering her own body as a brush. In such a way, the artist evokes collective memory and allows us to hear “the stories which couldn’t root down yet keep hovering around” by retracing the memories that have now been blurred.