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.
2014 “After” Chinoiserie (Sensing Obscurity lll)
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관리자 2014-09-16 18:00
2011
Single channel HD Video
5’40”
“After” Chinoiserie (Sensing Obscurity lll)
What happens to symbols of cultural dominance when the world order shifts?
The project seeks a post-colonial reclamation to the possibility of telling stories through the use of a multiplicity of narrative devices. The premise is that it is in the way that histories/stories are told that produces and re-produces untold stories, narratives and events. Set in Saltram House, an English Manor House (now National Trust property), the film takesplace ‘some point in the not so distant future’, at a moment in time when Chinas ascendance as a global power has givenrise to an opportunity to re-visit history differently. Using a mixture of documentary and narrative film tropes, the cut and paste aesthetics of hip-hop and chinoiserie; Saltram House, history as we know it under-goes a slippery transition in an attempt to remain relevant and shore-up its status as cultural capital. References to past events, unfolding archaeologies, recurring cinematic specters (Ang Lee’s Sense & Sensibility was filmed here in 1995) and the re-enactments and enactment of relational positionings.
Sensing Obscurity (I, II, III) is a work in three parts. A 2-channel installation, which is shot entirely within the hermetically ‘sealed’ interior of Saltram house. The second, a spatio-temporally deferred work disseminated through a form of digital bootlegging; and the final work which explores the format of citation, reproduction, mimicry, piracy and uses the motif of spinning encountered within each work to contemplate the continuities of history and the impossibilities of dis-entanglement.