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 Blow Up
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관리자 2013-03-25 10:09
BLOW UP
Seung Woo Back spent a number of weeks at an artist’s residency in Pyongyang, Korea’s capital, in 2001. Many of Back’s photographic subjects take issue with the phantasmal character of everyday reality. One example is his series on theme parks, where we reencounter the Twin Towers (famously destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001) in the suburbs of an Asian mega-city. But while a photographer in the best ethnographic tradition (the one associated with the Surrealist movement of the late1920s and early 1930s) does not have to pretend or invent anything to convey the amount of fiction that is part and parcel of our environment, it appears North Korea demanded a different approach. This is, after all, a country where the relationship between truth and fiction is being over-turned. Another obstacle hindering any productive look on the photo-grapher’s part is the omnipresence of state security. Not only was Back forbidden to take a single stroll without an official escort, his guards also told him what to shoot and what not. After submitting all his film materials to the officials at the end of each session, images he picked up the next day were either cropped or missing altogether. In other words, the role of the auteur, or the truly creative image-maker, had been assumed by a highly idiosyncratic state that is obsessed with its own image.
Back kept his North Korean archive in his studio for a long time, unsure of what to do about it. Years later, he visited a gallery exhibition showing photographs by another “failed” portraitist of the North Korean condition and, much to his surprise, stumbled upon a detail: a figure he recognized from his own photographs. This detail opened his eyes.Back revisited the photographs in his archive and began to focus on details by blowing up parts of the images. This process of blowing up photographs in order to highlight a telling detail is immortalized in Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie Blow-up (1966). Antonioni also dramatizes the destructive dialectics of this technique: the more you enlarge your detail to see it, the grainier the image becomes – until every recognizable thing dissolves in a fog. Although Back does not try to come that close to his elusive subject (be it street scene, an interior shot, or a group of people), the grayish surface and sickly coloring is the direct result of the photograph’s passage towards the invisible.