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.
Dave Hullfish BAILEY
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관리자 2020-09-05 11:09
Born 1963 in Denver, USA
Lives in Los Angeles
Dave Hullfish BAILEY, Pusan Perimeter in Three Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 2020, Archival pigment prints and clay-on-paper texts, mixed media, variable dimensions
As I was unable to visit Busan, I set about an experimental map that looks in from the outside, emphasizing connections to material systems and imaginary places far beyond the city’s limits. These include the Nakdong River, a conduit for people, trade, and sediments from the country’s interior, as well as mountains near my home in Los Angeles, which stood in for Korea’s wartime hinterlands during the filming of a television series (M*A*S*H*) I watched as a child. Those first representations still shape my imagination of Korea, even though I know they are fictions. I’m interested in the limits of our ability to know and represent, and how often our systems fail us: what they get wrong and what they leave out. Central to the work, then, is the attempt to create new descriptive systems that weave together human and non-human histories, near and far, language and matter.
The project is informed by the wholistic premises of Hangul script, as well as the alchemical merging of symbol and matter in Buncheong pottery from Gyeongsang Province. The auger bits or ‘cutters’ of modern cutter suction dredges are equally important for my thinking and for Busan—without them, Busan as a global city could not exist. Literally speaking, these cutters are the precise point of contact between the natural systems that formed the harbor, and the human narratives of expansion that seek to re-shape it. Their spinning teeth initiate a transition between two systems of order: the hydro-geological dynamics by which sand, gravel, clay, and silt are deposited in complex layers over eons, and the mechanical sorting of those sediments by size and composition for use in building the port’s future infrastructure. To me, the moments when, as a muddy submarine cloud, these sediments are literally suspended between natural history and human instrumentality suggests a concrete model for a new descriptive poetics or at least a place in which to look for one. In this inchoate state, where both time and place have been scrambled, there’s a clearly great risk of murkiness but at least the possibility that unforeseeable alignments may form and more integrated patterns of relation will emerge. If anything positive comes from the ‘suspension’ of the pandemic, perhaps it is that something similar can happen.
- excerpt from the artist's note