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 untitled(We Are Special Too)
Read 11,126
관리자 2009-08-28 11:40
Fiona Shaw? work encapsulates human vulnerability with a spastic ballet?like elegance, drawing from the academic rigidity of formalist and conceptual sculpture as a model to describe social exclusion and anxiety. Her works are tragicomic in their contorted gracefulness and wannabe ambition: forcing Joseph Kosuth chairs to balance torturously on sharpened pencils, comically posing Nam June Paik TV sets in parody of suicidal breakdown, re-forming John McCracken cubes to spell out SUCKS. Almost all her pieces incorporate some form of text: a drawing desperately declares I Got a System To Keep Me Alive, and a little wooden carved word with nails driven into it says OUCH. A simpatico paranoia exudes from everything she makes: inferiority complex, embarrassment, frustration, fear, the foundations of modern intimacy,
For Shaw words are synonymous with inadequacy and failure. Her second-hand language, with all its disposable meaning and transient usage, is piteously salvaged from the charity bin of popular culture. A bit damaged, dog-earred, and bruised her texts contrive hand-me-down affection, recycled ill-fitting truths. Her plagiarised song lyrics (always of the breaking up variety) and greeting card-like slogans, are rendered in impoverished materials such as gift shop stationary and waning helium filled party balloons, to convey the malaise of the emotionally inept and inarticulate.
Shaw? romanticism is fraught with suspicion and neurosis: Feelings, like words, are awkwardly, cripplingly aberrant, empirical systems which are neither rational nor trustworthy. Subjected to obsessive compulsive making processes, Shaw? maudlin scripts humorously transform from hypochondriac syndrome into proud badges of (under)achievement and deficiency, made all the more empathetic through their material abjection. Like abandoned shrines her words occupy an uneasy space in the world, astraumatic, dejected, and obsolete remains of those unspeakable sentiments between us.
ⓒPatricia Ellis, 2008 _ Independent Art Writer, London