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.
KIM Heecheon
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관리자 2020-09-05 00:00
KIM Heecheon, A Drill, 2020, Banner installation, 1,500×700cm (2), Tower in Old Town
A new work will be presented at a Tower (Parking lot) with the story Daily Walking Rehearsals by BAK Solmay. I started the new work with BAK Solmay’s story, more specifically with a paragraph including the quote”those who think unceasingly of
what must come to be, and tirelessly search for it in the present.” In this paragraph, the writer deals with the American Cultural Center arson incident and Kim Eun-Suk, who was a core/key figure/main character of the incident, keeps asking herself about the event in Gwangju (involving the Gwangju Democratization Movement)in May 1980 and wondering about the meaning of this time after the event. A narrator insists that Kim Eun-Suk says “At the same time, I could tell that they’d repeatedly asked themselves: ‘What if I’d been in Gwangju in May, 1980…?” (53) repeatedly at the first time. But suddenly the narrator says that (changes his/her opinion?) Kim Eun-Suk says “it hadn’t been a question of ‘what if’ that they’d posed repeatedly to themselves, but the very fact that anyone had been there in Gwangju at the time,” and I started my work from there.
-From artist’s note