20th century AD

There are scarcely any better laboratories for a application of mind of the interpenetration of art and politics than the international biennial. southerly Korea's recent Kwangju Biennale is a case in point. individual week after the Biennale's shut up last November, the Korean regulation announced the reopening of an investigation into the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, in which conduct troops fired on unarmed civilians and caused a still-undetermined number of deaths. (The official tally of 192 has drawn out been disputed by unofficial reports which place the toll in the thousands.) The announcement was seen by dint of some commentators as an effort to divert attention from a burgeoning corruption crisis which has landed individual former president in jail and threatens to touch the common administration. But it was also clearly motivated by the agency of the same forces that convinced management and private funders to high hill a major international exhibition in a region of Korea otherwise little visited by means of outsiders. Like the investigation, the Kwangju Biennale was conceived as a type of President Kim Young-Sam's commitment, as the first nonmilitary leader in Korea since the Japanese occupation, to a more unclose and democratic society. It also exhibited an effort to exorcise the lingering souls of the 1980 massacre.

Thus, in ways that were not always obvious to outside visitors, the Biennale's form and location were greatly shaped by dint of internal concerns. The influx of circulating medium and attention was designed to intenerate traditional antagonisms between Seoul and this historically rebellious region. And the officially sanctioned celebration of Kwangju and its history serv as an announcement that the days of political repression belong irrevocably to the past.

At the same time, the Biennale also had an international agenda. Jostling to position it as the Asian biennial (although single this year in Shanghai and an upcoming biennial in Hong Kong may challenge that standing), the organizers, beneath the leadership of National Museum director Lim Young-Bang and artistic director to leeward Young-Woo, invited 92 artists from 50 countries to participate in its core exhibition. Meanwhile, a series of satellite displays highlighted Asian and particularly Korean achievements in contemporary art, traced the impulse toward political art in the West from Picasso to the at hand applauded Korea's own tradition of political art and revealed Asia's filled participation in contemporary explorations of art and technology. The objective of the whole was to burnish Korea's reputation as a powerful emergent force in the international cultural scene

However, visitors plung into the opening chaos might be forgiven for thinking that Kwangju was not quite ready for prime time. Artists complained about their difficulties in completing flat simple installations, and a number of works were not at any time completed. Meanwhile, confusion caused by dint of the scarcity of multilingual guides, technical difficulties with various electronic works, the unavailability of catalogues and pres materials and the lack of adequate transportation between the sum of two units main exhibition sites made for a more than usually difficult viewing experience for opening visitors. The point in disputes seemed to stem from lack of communication between the Seoul-based organizers and local officials ill equipped for of that kind a massive onslaught of international visitors, and from the failure to adequately estimate the amount of time wanted to put together a cast on this scale.

But despite these puzzles the Biennale offered a wealth of provocative art, interesting emerging artists and novel (at least to this observer) information upon modern and contemporary Korean art. The core exhibition was titled "Beyond the Borders," signaling the now de rigueur rejection of notions of border, center and national identity, in favor of displacement and cultural hybridity. The selections were made through a team of international curators, individual each for seven regions of the world, with a focus upon emerging artists.

While there were a small in number biennial regulars, there were also many new faces. By abandoning the notion of Venice-style national pavilions, the of recent origin biennials cropping up in like unexpected corners of the globe as Johannesburg, Istanbul and Kwangju appear to be less beholden to national politics and freer to make unconventional choices. At the same time, however, they have a inclination to choose artists who reinforce the outside world's vision of cultural "authenticity."

Thus, for instance, Cameroon was exhibited by a set of bottle tree and fetishes through Pascale Martine Tayou that were pieced together from forest-land scraps, old socks, paint cans, doll heads and other bits of flotsam and jetsam. southern African artist Kay Hassan contributed a pulsating mural depicting rural life in his region Assembled from torn fragments of colorful [i]affiche[/i]s and billboards, his painting presented a striking image of folk life in a folk diction In a similar manner, the folk phraseology of Eastern Europe is indicateed by the intricate geometric patterning in Polish artist Zofia Kulik's photomontages. In a surprisingly auspicious subversive maneuver, Kulik counters the sweetness of these formal compositions through building them out of images of recent missiles, skulls, naked dancers and spear heads.