Monoculture and Its Discontents - Kwangju Biennale 2000 - Statistical Data Included

Curatorially, this year's scaled-back Kwangju Biennale presented a resurgence of nationalist identities despite its global theme.

In 1995 the Kwangju Biennale had an auspicious beginning with a spectacular $23-minion bundle and a reported 1.6 million visitors [see A.i.A., Apr. '96] The next to the first version in 1997 still attracted above 900,000 visitors on half that amount [sec A.i.A., July '98] on the other hand a few months later, a financial crisis swept Asia, almost completely freezing the art market for sum of two units years. Now that the crash appears to be over, Korea can one time more afford to hold megashows. Although Koreans continue to call this the "IMF age," a time of regulatory policies and ongoing layoffs, the art exhibition finds itself trending upward again.

With 246 artists from 46 countries gathered beneath the broad theme "Man + Space," the Kwangju Biennale 2000 drew diminished, notwithstanding that still impressive, public response. In the course of 71 days (Mar. 29-June 7) above 614,000 visitors were attracted upon a $7.2 million budget--comparable to the $8 million in combined governmental and private funding for last year's 48th Venice Biennale. As with the earlier Kwangju casts a high percentage of the attendees were retired clan and school children brought in upon bus tours financed by various conduct agencies.

In addition to the main exhibition, spread from one extremity to the other of two multistory halls of the Biennale center the incident included four major "special exhibitions" focused upon human rights, national divisions, and art in the Asian community. A minor special exhibition, "Forest of Human Beings & Forest of Paintings," consisted of a traditional clay wall running between the exhibition venue along which centurys of mostly student artists could be seen producing art work.

Three minutes away from the main exhibition hall, the Kwangju City Folk Museum housed "New Media Art," compos chiefly of video installations that attracted real little attention. Here, as in the other Biennale sections, the real superstars were absent, No bewilderment then, that many of Seoul's artists, journalists and critics, who earlier this year made a 14-hour flight to diocese the retrospective of video pioneer Nam June Paik at the Guggenheim Museum in novel York, did not bother to visit Kwangju, just an hour's flight from the capital, level though the Biennale is clearly the largest art fact in Korea. The city's provincial location may have been a factor, on the other hand remoteness does not seem to have harmed other mammoth cultural undertakings, of the like kind as the Pusan Film Festival or last April's inaugural Chonju Film Festival, the two of which were highly praised by the agency of the Korean and international press

In an interview, Paik Nakchung (Korea's preeminent literary critic and intellectual celebrity, and Jurgen Habermas's partner several years ago in an unclose discussion about reunification in Germany and Korea) proffered a good explanation for Kwangju's designation as the biennial site: "The public thinks that Kwangju deserv something." As the capital and politically restive cultural center of Chollanam-do Province, Kwangju was heavily burdened under the military dictator Park Chung Hee, who rul Korea between 1961 and 1979 In May 1980 during the political agitation following Park's assassination, about 2000 citizens of all ages were slaughtered through national security forces. Following democratization in the late 1980 and early '90 Koreans acknowledged that it was Kwangju's revolve to host a big cultural circumstance such as the Biennale, and not many spoke out about what it might cost

Originally promot as an international art exhibition--the first display of its size in Asia--the Kwangju Biennale this time had certain aspects of a Korean folk festival, single that also included international participants who could loan it global exposure and endorsement. A surfeit of mass-entertainment occurrences accompanied the show. While the earlier Kwangju biennials, subtitled "Beyond the Borders" (1995) and "Unmapping the Earth" (1997) aimed to proceed beyond national and geographic boundaries, curators this year were constrained by the agency of often problematic geographic categories. Furthermore, an unacceptably poor standard of English translation marred many of the catalogue true copys and no real attempt was made to address a global audience, or plane that of neighboring Asian countries.

Many foreign journalists had difficulty getting into the pre-opening incident on Mar. 28, because they had not however been issued press passes and the guards could not be swayed. one time admitted to the opening peculiar critics were astonished by the large sky-colored arrows painted on the floor quite through the main hall and through the pretty guides in miniskirts and high heels who were standing everywhere to direct pedestrian traffic. (Temporary workers hired without by a modeling agency, these hostesse addressed visitors one-by-one with a 90-degree curve and a friendly "please draw near in," and cautioned those who wandered not upon the beaten path with a timid "please this way.") The tradeshow extravaganza present the appearanceed completely out of place smooth to Korean observers.