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.
2022 Alexander Ugay
Read 2,189
관리자 2022-12-16 13:58
Obscuraton #10, 2022, Camera obscura, wood, gelatin silver photography, inkjet prints, Dimension variable.
Russia, the vicinity of the Tumen river. Latitude 42°41'29.56"N / Longitude 130°42'5.52"E Kazakhstan, Bastobe hill. Latitude 45°18'16.32"N / Longitude 78° 2'21.43"E
More Than a Hundred Thousand Times, 2020, Single-channel HD video, 35min. 48sec. Commissioned and produced by Art Sonje Center.
Kazakh artist and photographer Alexander Ugay (who is of Korean descent) documents places associated with specific events and memories through his sculptural and photographic installations known as “obscuratons.” Ugay’s obscuratons are a type of pinhole camera, in which light passes through many small holes onto special photosensitive paper, allowing for photography with no lens. For this exhibition, Ugay used an obscuraton with fifty-two apertures to merge two different places with special significance for “Koryo-ins,” or Korean diaspora in post-Soviet states. First, using only twenty-six of the camera’s apertures, he captured an image near Dumangang River (or Tumen River) on the border of North Korea and Russia, a common crossing point which is where the first Korean immigrants to Russia settled around 1860. Then, using the other twenty-six apertures, he took a second image on the same paper at the foot of Mount Bastobe in Kazakhstan, which is where many Koreans were dropped off in 1937 after being forcibly moved from East Asia to Central Asia by the Stalin regime. As a result, the light and imagery of these two seminal sites was integrated on the same photosensitive surface. Ugay’s innovative photographic device functions almost like an industrial stamping machine, pressing and clipping disconnected elements into a single form. Functioning as both a photograph and a sculptural or architectural object, the obscuraton visually and conceptually links places and events that persist through the flow of time among the diaspora. The final image resembles an encrypted piece of evidence of an unknown homeland, as well as a summons to return there. But of course, a person can never actually return to an “unknown homeland,” any more than they can reach the promised land.
The accompanying video, More Than a Hundred Thousand Times (2020), shows “Koryo-ins” and migrant workers from the former Soviet Union who now work in Korea reenacting the repetitive movements of their labor outside the factory. Through the endless repetition of monotonous movements, the subjects become alienated from their consciousness, entering a state akin to meditation. Within this state, their floating memories fill them and the viewer with feelings of emptiness.
b. 1978, Kyzylorda, Kazakhstan
Lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan
The third-generation of Koryoin (ethnic Korean in the former Soviet Union), Alexander Ugay uses photography, video, and collage to document stories about individuals and groups, migration histories, nostalgia originating in past experience, and places where past and future coexist. In the 2000s, he produced his “cinema-object” series of short films shot on 8mm and 16mm cameras produced during the Soviet era; since 2017, he has created his own “obscuratons,” devices based on the pinhole camera approach that he uses for artistic series in which he locates historically and ideologically important settings in order to capture spatial and temporal continua. His major solo exhibitions include Topology of Image (Aspan Gallery, Almaty, 2018) and More than an Image, Less than an Object (Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, 2017), and he has also taken part in events such as the 6th Moscow Biennale (2015) and the 1st New Museum Triennial (2009).