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.
OBSERVATIONS OF THE DOCUMENTARY: MIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT IN BUSAN (NARA LEE × JIGON KIM × YOUNG-JO KIM)
12/22 (WED) 17:00
- The documentary directors of Busan are historians of Busan and its vicinity. The images they take, record, and gather capture the bodies, dwellings, and histories of men, women, those with flesh, those displaced, erased, and pushed aside, and those who are captured ‘reveal’ themselves to us. Young-jo Kim (Still and All, 2015), who documented the fortune-tellers by the Yeongdo bridge, a haenyeo (female diver) telling the story of her deceased daughter, and an old woman displaced from Sanbok road, as well as the lepers from Sancheong in Gyeongsangnam-do, and Jigon Kim (Grandma series, Steel Boat, 2021) will discuss the power of the documentary.
- Nara Lee
Nara Lee is a researcher at the Film & Transmedia Lab at Dong-eui University. Her theoretical research and criticism focus on film aesthetics, cinema, and the moving image. She contributed to the anthologies Aleksandr Sokurov and Harun Farocki and wrote numerous critical essays and academic papers. She translated Georges Didi-Huberman’s Out of the Dark and The Man Who Walked in Color into Korean.
- Young-jo Kim
Kim was born in Busan in 1970. He studied film at Kyungsung University and Université Paris-VIII. He has produced documentary films through his film studio Monday Morning established in 2011. Kim is serving as a professor of Digital Contents at Dong-eui University.
- Jigon Kim
Since Unfamiliar Dreams (2008), a poetic documentary that featured Samil Cinema, a double feature cinema in Busan, he has pushed the boundaries of his works in and outside the cinema.