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.
Nakdong River (Mun Jae Won)
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관리자 2022-12-19 10:29
Professor, Korean Studies Institute, Pusan National University
525.15 kilometers in length. This is South Korea’s longest river, originating on Mount Hambaek in Gangwon Province and traveling through Gyeongsang Province before emptying into the southern sea to the west of Busan. With a name that means “east of Garak (an ancient Korean state),” it is imbued with a millennium’s worth of four emotions (joy, sorrow, anger, and pleasure) in the kingdoms of Gaya and Silla, coursing with the emotions associated with the experiences of the Imjin Invasions, the Korean War, and the modernization process.
With a history dating back millennia that cannot be quantified in terms of administrative lot numbers, the Nakdong is not simply a distant part of the natural backdrop. It was a frontier of history—a place where people on the margins came together to create a place to live. But the words of that frontier could never be expressed in language; the patterns of the land have been erased. The cries of the sands that the river recalls have been revived as a stream that gleams brightly even in darkness; they have been captured in a mesh of literature that could not bear to keep silent. The gathered words of the people along its banks shared dreams of the sea—a sea of survival and freedom.
“Flowing and flowing, the water arrives here, gathering its tributaries into a single body that proceeds toward the sea. Along the river, a chessboard pattern of fields lies open to the distant sea, scattered villages embraced in their broad bosom. The river, the field, and the people who live there—the river has flowed for a long time, and the people have long abided as well.” (Cho Myung-hui, “The Nakdong River”)
Often, the paths of those waters have been forcibly blocked, their channels altered, and while they have resisted painful algal blooms, the shackled Korean lives that have continued along its length have sometimes bared their “quietly festering shoulders.” Sometimes, we see it as the face of the wind soothing those scars; other times, it rises suddenly with the bare-knuckle force of fierce survival. All the way, it continues on…