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 Ghosts From Bamboo Forest
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관리자 2013-03-25 09:28
GHOSTS FROM BAMBOO FOREST
Rho’s labyrinthine space, with its mirrors of shiny metal, sets out to evoke a particular cinematic experience: the apparition, or ghostly appearance.The artist is thinking of Asian movies from the mid-1960s until about 1980, but ghost stories have a long tradition in Asia, where they are closely tied to cosmologies, spiritual beliefs and ancestor worship. In Korea, these stories date back to The Three Kingdoms period (57 BC-668 AD).The ghost (almost universally coded as female) is an ambiguous figure that is both incomplete and excessive. It stands for pain, rejection, betrayal and loss, but also strength in its unwillingness to conform to any societal standards.Because of its ambiguous character, the modern cinema ghost is the perfect fit for the interstices between a largely traumatic period(in Japan after World War II; in Korea after the Korean War) and rapid social change. In the feverish pace of the Asian economic miracle, deeply ingrained social structures were violently transformed almost overnight.
Running counter to a specifically modern temporality that encroaches upon people’s work schedules and the experience of social fragmentation, the ghost rather adheres to Buddhist-coded temporalities (cyclical structures) and their ability to overcome temporal and local divides.This observation can serve as a starting point for Rho’s labyrinthine structure. As so often in art, the work’s spectacular visibility, even beauty, is almost misleading. Although the mirroring has a disorienting effect, it is not only a visual phenomenon but also a mirroring of time. The “bamboo forest” denies any here and now; it offers its visitors an equally seductive and eerie multitude of viewpoints and temporalities. Or, to put it simply, a possible ghost’s perspective.