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 Minjung
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관리자 2020-09-05 15:32
Born 1985 in Busan, South Korea
Lives in Seoul
SONG Minjung, Wild Seed, 2020, Single channel video, color, sound(stereo), mixed media, 22min
In her installations and videos SONG Minjung observes a world of mixed physical and non-physical relationships. She addresses contemporary topics such as identity, gender, body, non-body, disability, and trans identity seen through online and offline characters and representations. SONG is fascinated by what is described as the 4th industrial revolution, where robots and Artificial Intelligence are developed for “untact” consumption and “untact” communication, in which a consumer/citizen do not have an actual face-to-face encounter with another consumer/citizen. An “untact” society is where social contact is reduced to body to technology (screen) interaction. Today it is possible to have multiple personalities, nicknames, and online (bodies) profiles, and SONG traces and records these identities and examines their value systems. SONG questions the social contact, social normality, and how society tries to define and frame these “new” body types within certain norms. In the work Window (2019), SONG mixes past, present, and future to describe the stories, experiences, anxieties, and eras of four women living in late 19th century Vienna, France in 1899, Russia in 1901, and Seoul in 2020. Window deals with narratives in a (non) body state of being, fused with the languages of four voices living in different times, while a work like AKSARA MAYA (2019) borrows a role-playing game interface to address non-physical relationships, the body and identity issues. Both works presents time and the (female) body in an almost liquid state of being, a distorted time, where physical presence of human melts into technology.
SONG Minjung’s practice resembles the process of “uploading” especially of “user” video-sharing platforms and communities, such as YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter. In the work Talker (2019) the artist borrows the storytelling technique known from V-logs—also known as a video blog or video log—on YouTube. We follow an augmented reality puppy through a ghost-like narrative, which creates an almost real experience, like a documentary of a puppy and its owner. Our body is constantly looked at, discussed, and negotiated through advertisement and our social surroundings, and we are influenced by body norms and the idea of the perfect body. We can search and create the perfect body and perfect avatar online, and also make body-doubles of ourselves with instant weight loss and nose jobs, which adds to the complexity and absurdity of the ideal body. SONG delves into how Social Networking Services work, and uses SNS in her fictions as a vehicle to discuss 21st century relationships between online and offline, the real and the virtual, and the illusion of normality.