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.
2018 Tomorrow I Leave
Read 13,123
관리자 2018-08-21 11:53
Tomorrow I Leave, Mixed-media, photographs, postcards, found objects, artist book, vitrines, HD video, speakers, Dimensions variable, 2018, Courtesy of the artists
LIN + LAM
Tomorrow I Leave
Tomorrow I Leave (2010) is a mixed media installation exhibited at Busan Biennale. Comprising photographs and a video, found objects, and an artist’s book, it focuses on former Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong and Malaysia that were being marketed as tourism attractions. After the Vietnam War the country was devastated and hundreds of thousands of people suffering from famine and poverty had to leave the country. In the late 1980s Hong Kong accepted 100,000 Vietnamese refugees while Malaysia took in over 250,000 and formed a refugee camp on a desert island. These camps were closed in 2000 and 1991 respectively, but following the closures tourists rushed there to ‘sightsee’ the ruins. As such, ‘dark tourism’ invites tourists to sites with tragic stories of natural or human disasters. It educates people not to repeat the mistakes of the past, yet there is also a criticism that it commercializes tragic pasts. Lin + Lam explore how traumas remain in historical sites, which have metamorphosed and become entangled in discussions about issues such as leisure, heritage, and survival are connected by tourism. The title of the work is translated into ‘Ngay Mai Em Di’ in Vietnamese, which is a line from a famous and beloved Vietnamese song that was customarily heard over the intercom when a refugee was discharged from the camp. It is a song of both hope and mourning, and speaks to the conflicting feelings bound up in the legacy of war and aspiring to be free. Lin + Lam visited the former refugee camps and wrote the lyrics on postcards. They then sent the postcards to where this work was exhibiting. Some of the postcards are displayed at the Biennale. The postcards that deliver the sorrow of refugees and found objects are juxtaposed with an album with photos of ironically quiet landscapes around the camps, all of which hint to the desperate waiting suffered by the people who used to live there. This work, which collected ambivalent feelings, shows violence and deficiency are revealed when fragments of traumatic histories become a tourism product.