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.
2010 1. They are still alive-magalania 2. Sea monster
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관리자 2011-04-11 22:06
Kang sets off his artistic journey at those questions about the beginning of the world that cannot be proved through scientific processes. The magalania and the sea monster to be shown at the sea exhibition of this biennale are parts of ‘They Are Still Alive’ Series that has resulted from such interests of him.
Kang materializes and gives forms to the possibility of the existence of these creatures and seamonster, a creature in the deeps of the sea which is yet unknown area and is said to be the territory that no living thing can inhabit.
Those beings, which are in the outside of reality and are endowed with life by Kang, oblige us, above all, to ponder upon in an agonizing way the entities that have been suppressed or forced to be absent in the course of the development of civilization. When the beasts/monsters/creatures are unfamiliar existences deranged from everyday perceptions, then they are not different from what are on the outside of the category of the normal in our lives. In other words, the interest in these bizarre beasts/monsters/creatures is nothing but the paradoxical reminding of daily life and the critical introspections on the territory in which we reside. In front of Kang’s works we are to be confronted, therefore, by unfamiliar living/life deviated from evolution/evolutionary velocity.