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.
2006 The Mussel Shells Ocean
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관리자 2009-08-27 09:47
I take my studio to the beach, the sea itself become both my muse and my medium. I am then one with sea, the creator and the created, the mentor and the disciple.
When I create the ocean with mussel shells, my theme and my medium fuse and I am offering a homage to the sea. Glass when lit, becomes water, solid turns to liquid, and within the womb of the boat, glass in turn remembers sand.
I use very little man-made material in my installations, and I use them only so long as they evoke more primal forms and elements. The boat and water, glass and sand, metal and earth.
In my recent paintings too, I am looking at the elemental. In a sense, I paint my installations onto the canvas―basic geometric forms and patterns: how the earth appears from a satellite, reduced to its essence―the dots and lines of human settlements, water and earth.
As the saint poets once brought art to the people, away from the courts and made art of the people, today’s artist too must create art in the world of the people, away from the galleries. His work must talk to them and their lives and memories must
speak through his work. My boat must remember the perilous journeys it has made, the carpenters’hands, the fishermen’s songs, the impressions of their bodies on its surfaces. It must remember life in the sea and lives around the sea. My art then becomes a mnemonic device and through it I give back to the sea what it has given me.