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Busan Biennale 2008

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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.


2008 At the Bottom of Things, Around the Bend, Step to Somewhere

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관리자 2009-08-27 17:11

작가LISA RUYTER
Since 1996, Lisa Ruyter's paintings have been based on individual photographs taken by the artist and have, therefore, formed a map of her movements around the globe as well as her personal development. The photographs, although casual, are always intentional. Ruyter then selects a small percentage of these pictures and begins the process of fixing them in paint. She 'transcribes' the photographs onto the picture plane, selecting the portions of the image that she wishes to render, leaving out details she finds trivial, while focusing on others. Once the paintings have been drawn in, Ruyter begins to map out colors, filling in her own drawings. The final fixing of the images occurs when Ruyter, usually in a single sitting, redraws the lines with a paint pen, bringing the painting into sharp focus. The power of Ruyter’s paintings lies in the way she takes on seemingly ordinary images and makes them extraordinary. What appear, at first, as giant paint-by-number works slowly reveal themselves to be complex arrangements of flat colors with poignant, powerful subjects. The effect freezes the narrative and pushes it toward abstraction. Whether painting crowds, party scenes, fashion models swaying down the catwalk, trees or Greek island landscapes, Ruyter's need to document the world around her through this disinterested, removed lens where the viewer is both there and not there is the stance of an original artist with a keen eye and cool, distanced vantage point. The Coolness is ambiguous; is it a pose or an evocation of an expended, alienated humanity?
- MC, NB, MD
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