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 We Call This Work
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관리자 2013-03-25 09:09
WE CALL THIS WORK
Like a three-dimensional photograph made of ceramic, Cain’s floor-piece bears the physical traces of labor. Collaborating with LC members (the Learning Council is the body of Korean citizens, artists and Artistic Director who worked together to make the ”Garden of Learning”), the artist asked people to perform daily activities at their workplace.Cain was particularly interested in contemporary work processes (in the service industry, for example) where the physical body is almost absent.To register the body’s imprints, a large group of wet clay tiles was laid out on the floor. The people remembered and demonstrated their movements on this precarious stage. Tiles inevitably cracked in the process of firing, which – as one participant mentioned – might be a strong metaphor for the unpredictable nature of work processes.The artist added several clay balls and pipes to the glazed tiles, thereby suggesting a family of forms whose orthodoxy stems from the minimalist repertoire. Cain’s ambition, however, is less to create a museological narrative for his work than to re-infuse modernist forms with their once original connection – to the presence of bodies and the materiality of labor.