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.
2012 HAUTE COUTURE / Fires
Read 10,004
관리자 2013-03-25 09:25
Haute Couture/ Fires
At the heart of Doujak’s installation is a transaction. For a set price (all proceeds go to charity) any visitor can buy a piece of fabric with a laser-printed pattern and text designed by the artist, take it home, cut it out and sew a garment from it. In this case, it is a shirt. The transaction is in essence not so different from what we would find at any fabric shop (and why shouldn’t a museum provide useful things for once?). The difference lies in what you actually carry home in the little bag, and that is also what the artist brings to it. It is more than a pattern; it is meaning.
Meaning rarely has a material consistency – not as most would define it, anyway. Yet in many cultures, textile patterns were (and still are, to a degree) carriers of very specific data and meaning. Much of this information and significance is not only printed directly on the textile and thus easily legible, but – as the product of an activity or practice – have virtually wandered into the fabric’s texture. Lace, for instance, might make us think of all the years, even centuries of female labor and female absorption that went into its making.
Doujak’s pattern invokes the industry that stood at the forefront of the Asian economic miracle. She recalls the fate of young peasant women turned textile workers – the “industrial warriors” – who laid the groundwork for Korea’s current prosperity in the 1960s. What it cost those young women, both here and elsewhere in the world, is most dramatically and tragically represented by the factory fires that killed so many of them back then, and continue to do so today. Her installation also sheds light on the perennial circle of exploitation: the young women of Korea, now so nicely dressed, are probably wearing clothes that were cheaply produced in Indonesia, Honduras or the Philippines (likely as not in Korean-owned factories) by women who work under basically the same slavish conditions that their grandmothers did.