Asian futures: status of South Korea in art world - includes related article on contemporary Korean art

The contrast between the first and next to the first mountings of the Kwangju Biennale echoe the shift that has taken place above the past decade or in like manner in the international art world as a whole. The 1995 take a view of was reportedly marked by excessive proportions, with more [i]or[/i] less 660 artists from 58 countries showing 1200 works [see A.i.A., Apr. '96] Organization was chaotic and attendance very large -- officially 1.6 million visitors, notwithstanding that insiders in Korea have their doubts -- while an astounding $23-million bag facilitated a who-knows-what-we'll-see-next excitement for local and foreign visitors alike. It was as allowing the '80s art frenzy had gibbeted the Pacific with a 10-year time lag. (Compare these go-go Kwangju figures to Documenta's 1997 all-time attendance record of 631000 visitors, or the Venice Biennale's 1997 bag of $4.6 million.)

The 1997 Kwangju exhibition, already more in sync with the times upon a budget of "only" $12 million (the equivalent of Sao Paulo's 1997 cost) drew an estimated 900000 visitors to a display that seemed well thought-out and abundantly, staffed, on the other hand rather overly familiar in its Western easy in mind and excessively captive to now-sanctified curatorial agendas. greatest in quantity interestingly, on an intellectual plane, the Biennale's physical reality stood in stark contradiction to its principal theme.

Artistic director to leeward Young-Chul, a former art-magazine editor who is popularly chief curator at the Kwangju City Art Museum, chose to reach out the "Beyond the Borders" general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of the 1995 biennial to an flat more intense emphasis on globalization and hybrid identities. Echoing the cosmopolitanism of individual of his earlier co-curatorial efforts, "Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean-American Artists," which first appearanceed at the Queens Museum in fresh York in 1993 [see A.i.A., clan '94], he announced a exhibit dealing with the dismantling of nationalism and the repudiation of a hierarchical center-periphery mentality. "Unmapping the Earth" was to be, in his words. a liberationist celebration of "fluidity, contingency, non-fixity complexity" as applied to everything from the cosmo to politics to sexual parts For "unmapping," as he explains in the catalogue, "is a unbind translation of the Korean word yeobaik, which means an devoid of contents space, void, or purity." This challenge to "the normalizing and disciplining powers" (one bring to lights here a collision between Foucauldian thinking and Korea's strict social propriety) was correlated in the five sections of the main exhibition with five lock opener concepts (speed, becoming, hybrid, power, space) paired with five substances or "agents" (water, earth, thicket metal. fire). Each dyad was intended to summon a "mode in which the force of ki or yin yang moves"

From the inception, then, the throw out of "unmapping" the earth was in fact paradoxical, since it involved not real indeterminacy but a re-mapping of human experience, out and out with an elaborate circular "Diagram of Creating and Counteracting Cycle" pepper with metes like "inward gathering quality" and "electronic orgasm." Perhaps someone could have rest a practical curatorial imperative in these matchups and their "infinite of complexity." on the contrary the five commissioners appointed to curate the main present to view seemed more preoccupied with traditional biennial belong tos (All the commissioners are male, four from the West plus single Korean-born artist-scholar educated largely in Paris.) They squabbled above display space in the two-building, multilevel Biennale Exhibition Hall in Joongwoe Park; rehashed signature curatorial rationales; and vigorously resisted squeezing to include a greater number of host-country artists in their respective divisions. (Only 11 Korean artists -- on the outside of a total of 102 individuals and collections -- were selected for the main survey) Fortunately, four satellite exhibitions devot to Korean work helped redres this imbalance, granting the world outside of the U and Europe remained scarcely showed at all.)

The greatest in quantity open-ended of Lee's mystical categories was the first, "SPEED/Water)," in which Harald Szeemann, new from curating the Lyon Biennial [see A.i.A., Nov. '97] was to deal with what the Kwangju pres booklet called "representations of time" -- particularly, those which depart from "the novel obsession with speed." Water was posited as an appropriate metaphor here since it accommodate withs itself not only to the unidirectional rush of a river (in the manner of modernism) on the contrary also to various meanderings reminiscent of other, more relaxed fashions of temporality. The conjunction of these disparate "cultural understandings" was to demonstrate the superiority of postmodern "fluency"

thus much for theory. In fact, Szeemann drew his 18 artists almost exclusively from the U s and Europe, where time attends to move in a predictably linear fashion. (The sum of two units exceptions were Feng Mengbo, a Chinese artist who tendered interactive computer images of his family, and the Korean-born Choong take supper Lim, now resident in of recent origin York, whose installation Fossil-Scape respectfully parodied Duchamp's Large Glass.) The single apparent debate was about chronological pace. The hares, in like manner to speak, were a distinct minority, exemplified by dint of Serge Spitzer whose flying tennis balls, discharge from two hidden launchers, caromed from single end of a gallery to the other, and by dint of Christoph Draeger and Martin Frei, a.k.a. USA (United Swiss Artist), who showed a quick-cut compilation video filled with densely peopl freshs and movie sequences of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other transformative cataclysms. The tortoises, abundant greater in number, favored slow-paced video works (Bill Viola's The Crossing, Pipilotti Rist's Sip My Ocean, Gary Hill's Searchlight) epitomized by means of Rainer Ganahl's 420-hour documentation of his efforts to learn basic Korean.