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.
2022 Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide)
Read 2,619
관리자 2022-12-16 15:07
Four Months, Four Million Light Years, 2020, Shamanistic film installation, textile and paper banners and watercolours, Dimension variable, 35min. Collection Mu.ZEE— Flemish Community.
Four Months, Four Million Light Years is a shamanic healing journey through space and time. This immersive film installation addresses the colonial narratives behind transnational and transracial adoption, specifically the historical relations between The Netherlands and Korea. The colonial print Een Schaman ofte Duyvel-Priester (Shaman or Devil’s Priest from the Tungus, 1692) by Dutchman Nicolaes Witsen acts as a pivotal point for a spiritual journey through time. This print is the first Western depiction of a shaman. It marks the beginning of a long history of racialised and infantilising descriptions of Asian people by white Europeans and the violent eradication of shamanistic cultures by missionaries. The exhibition time-travels from contemporary Dutch society and the participation of 3,418 Dutch soldiers in the deadly Korean War (1950–1953) to early Dutch colonial descriptions of Asian people. In the Netherlands alone around 40,000 people have been adopted from the Global South, often through child trafficking and with falsified documents.
The four months of the title refer to a law that required a minimum stay of four months in a Korean orphanage in order to become adoptable by law for the lucrative transracial adoption industry. This industry started to flourish after the Korean War and continues to live off the same colonial imagery from 300 years ago.
Textile, paper text banners, and drawings surround a video projection. Shamanic poems, songs and visions invoke the ancestors for support. The work is an homage to those who have been cut off from their mothers, fathers, family, ancestors, land, culture, and spirits.
* Since the end of the Korean War (1950–1953) between 200,000 and 300,000 Korean children have been sold and trafficked for transnational and transracial adoption to western and Christian countries in the Global North. Often with falsified documents and through child trafficking. In the 70’s and 80’s Busan was a center of a network of child traffickers collaborating with the local police, public servants, hospitals, birth clinics and Western Christian adoption agencies. Children were taken from the streets, market places, birth clinics and hospitals and then made orphan on paper and sold to adoption agencies. Up until today Korean children are sent for overseas adoption.
** On 8 February 2021 the Dutch government has decided to end transnational adoptions, because of the systemic abuse, trafficking, and fraud inherent to them. The government has offered apologies to men and women with an adoption past.
b. 1977, Busan, South Korea
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany; Amsterdam, Netherlands
Korean-Dutch artist Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide) exposes the systems that underpin the narratives behind our thinking and order, including those relating to gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. In her work, she raises questions about these systems as she intervenes to deconstruct and reconstruct them. Her solo exhibitions include Four Months, Four Million Light Years (ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels, 2021; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2022) and The Mother Mountain Institute (CASCO Art Institute, Utrecht, 2021), and she has taken part in the 11th Berlin Biennale (2020), the 5th Dhaka Art Summit (2020), and the 1st Asia Biennial & 5th Guangzhou Triennial (2015). Through these events, she has presented artworks that comment on the historical effects of Western imperialism and colonialism and the persistence of ideology within today’s political and social structures and life, while calling for a reflective attitude toward them. Based on these geopolitcal interests, the artist works within various genres such as video, installation, text, performance, and painting. Her work, akin to an homage, suggests a poetic and theatrical quality, conveying a sense of spiritual healing or consolation to those who have lost ties with their families, ancestors, land, culture, and spirit.