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 Ordinary person
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관리자 2013-03-25 09:30
ORDINARY PEOPLE
Jahyun Park bases her drawings on photographs of friends and close relatives – people she can trust. Some of the photographs, like the picture of the elderly woman with streams of milk running down her naked body, are highly staged.In the drawing process, Park covers the paper with thousands of tiny spots of black ink. This meticulous, highly time-consuming and self-absorbing process is not altogether different from Buddhist meditation techniques (mandala paintings). Indeed, a notion of the self or what we might call a person’s intimate core is certainly at issue here. And yet the vision behind it is deeply ambiguous: not purified, but rather overshadowed.
This impression of a “self under threat” is of course the direct result of Park’s technique: the portraits consist of varying densities of grey. Unbound by any clear contour line, they are incapable of providing any clear distinction between self and world. This inability to differentiate appears to keep her “ordinary people” suspended in a state of utter passivity.The image of an unstable identity is further highlighted by pictorial details such as the cigarette smoke obscuring large areas of the woman’s face, for example, or the sometimes almost invisible eyes. Finally, the pointillist rendering gives the impression of uneven or blotched skin – and this in a culture obsessed with immaculate surfaces.Running counter to the dominant ideals for beauty and appearance in Korea, Park’s portraits testify to the difficulties of maintaining a functioning self in a given society.