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 The Implausible Tree
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관리자 2009-08-28 11:39
The world of Andreas Schulenburg is just fundamentally wrong. A house plant is choked by its own pot as it sprouts with high-rise aspiration a Bond villain mountain lair is furnished with satellite technology atop an active volcano cloud a colourful parrot hangs pinata festive like a ridiculous suicide from a palm tree and a monstrous seagull lingers on a pastoral seaside cliff directly above a wee boat, just waiting to drop the mother load. It would all be a bit worrying if it wasn? so instantaneously endearing.
Schulenburg? work beguiles with its off-kilter truisms. Depicting a parallel version of life as we know it according to the perverse laws of Road Runner comics and the Peter Principle, his sculptures, paintings, drawings, and films are wickedly gleeful scenarios, taking the art of the wayward thought to hilariously dumb and puerile conclusions. For Schulenburg, cartooning is a realm where anything is possible. His satirical animal characters can (and do) get away with murder, while his cuddly objects and landscapes exist safely in the codes of Saturday morning escapism. Translated to the language of gushy adorableness, their barbarism becomes parodically inspirational.
Working primarily in felt and ceramics, as well as watercolour and hobby painter oils, Schulenburg? craft camp aesthetics deliver his hard-hitting observations with strategic charm offensive. Issues of nationalism, racism, violence, economics, and social exclusion, are tackled head on with little regard for etiquette a disarmingly sweet appearance excuses all manner of vulgarity. In a piece titled Mountain Felt a pair of quilted kops cushion the impact of two hijacked planes as little fuzzy critters scamper to a rope bridge, their inevitable doom on entertaining display. To laugh is sheer peccancy, but you really can? help it? that we?e all just a little bit evil (in the most affable, congenial, and best-intentioned way) is very key to empathy. To be perfect is divine, but Schulenburg? wrongness is the best of humanity.
ⓒPatricia Ellis, 2008 _ Independent Art Writer, London