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 태양
Read 11,170
관리자 2009-08-27 16:01
The artist is at heart a mark-maker, whether by choice or by instinct. Many artists begin their careers as painters, and then graduate to more direct forms made possible with everyday materials and with the accessibility of their implied meaning. This has been the case with Cui Xianji, whose intimate and nostalgic impressions of childhood, a life filled with innate sensation and strong personal emotions, have been transformed into a more rigorous arena for the espousal of formal and conceptual realizations.
Both the making of marks and the presentation of installations have their origin in a relationship to a sense of mystery approaching faith. The essential symbol which animates Xianji’s work is a gestural glyph, or scribble, which is easily misinterpreted as a type of language?but which means nothing at all. Rather, it represents the terra firma of inspiration, the ground upon which other ideas and experiences may be constructed, and which has a role in each of his many and varied expressions. Xianji’s glyphs are built using caulk instead of paint, a material originated for construction. It is shot from a gun, and in this way the artist not only trades painting for sculpture, but he is allowed to interject a painterly aspect into the new work by taking the essential gesture both in terms of its assigned meaning and its material indications. This form of expression is not merely random, but adheres to subconscious disciplines such as automatic writing by the Surrealists, or the “first thought, best thought? philosophy of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
- David Gibson