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.
2008 Moderation
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관리자 2009-08-28 10:55
If pointing this out is the artist? intent, then we should also look at the linearity and materiality of the piece. It is not easy to look at aluminum as a serious material for sculpture. The gravitas of steel, bronze, or even wood are traditional sculptural media more at home on the worksite. Ahn? choice of materials lacks a definite mass. The lines that criss-cross through the sky haphazardly have a sinister presence speaking of both the city and modernity. It is as if lines for Internet, telephone, and television form an exaggerated image of communication. We feel loneliness and discontinuation despite this network of communication lines. The artist explains that a "knot is tied in these lines, but dissipates and degenerates into a unconsciousness characteristic of modern life." The quality of psychological state in the modern individual is expressed through the presentation of this linearity.
In his new artwork, Moderation Ahn retains his unique sense of linearity and expands his work massively into three-dimensional space. Using modern lines of communication to tell a city tale, Moderation draws a psychological standard of city dweller solitude. The tangled wires of modern city life shows humanistic existence. However, Ahn? straight lines express the erasure of all human aspects in the life of the modern man.
ⓒHyungtak Jung _ Independent Curator