[Roundup Review] KIAF, Gwangju Biennale and Media City Seoul (October 2010) by Andy St. Louis

Seoul

KIAF, the Gwangju Biennale and Media City Seoul Art Report from South Korea By Andy St. Louis

t has been said that Korea is the most Confucian IKorean nation in Asia. This manifests itself in all aspects of life—at the convenience store, on the bus, in romance and dating, at the bar—especially with strangers. The basis of Confucian doctrine is the Five Relationships, which essentially dictate the appropriate way to act in five specific relationships and are extrapolated to cover all the possible relationships in society. That these social relationships are so concretely prescribed is arresting to a Western sensibility, all the more so since our relationships with other “strangers”—contemporary art, for example—are wholly left up to the discretion of the individual.

“Despite the Confucian influences that pervade so many aspects of daily life in this country, contemporary art is granted a rulebook all its own; and it’s a blank canvas”

Fall is the international art season in South Korea, which plays host to several major art exhibitions this year: the Korea International Art Fair (KIAF), Gwangju Biennale, the Seoul International Biennale of Media Art (Media City Seoul), and the Busan Biennale. These exhibition programs support the nation’s ambitious campaign to keep pace with other East Asian countries in terms of cultural offerings. If 2010 is any indication, South Korea is not only keeping pace, but in some instances setting it. It is not mere chance that neighboring China’s highly regarded Shanghai Asia Pacific Contemporary Art Fair (ShContemporary) changed its exhibition dates this year to match those of the Korea International Art Fair (KIAF). Taking place on Seoul’s equivaliant of New York’s Fifth Avenue, a decidedly upscale KIAF 2010 drew some 70,000 visitors to see art works presented by 193 galleries from 16 countries. Organized by the Galleries Association of Korea, this 9th edition of the fair proved to be the most representative among international art fairs seeking to woo collectors in today’s/tomorrow’s Asia. While other international art fairs here have quietly embraced regionalism—Shanghai’s ShContemporary art fair re-branded itself as the Asia Pacific Art Fair, downplaying its international origins—the KIAF has let it be known that the whole world is welcome in Seoul. 14

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Kengo Nakamura, Usual Supper, 2010. Courtesy: Megumi Ogita Gallery, Tokyo and KIAF, Seoul

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Overview of KIAF (Korea International Art Fair), Seoul 2010. Photo: Macinnis

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“To be sure, it is of no small significance that South Korea is an open society in a part of the world where authoritarian regimes—albeit dressed in sparkling consumer facades—mostly have the last word”

As if to underscore this point, the UK, a country that is a leader in contemporary art, was chosen as the guest country for this year’s KIAF. Leading figures in the British contemporary art scene were invited to discuss present and future of British art, as well as the relationship between art fairs and biennales. These included Hans Ulrich Obrist, at the Serpentine Gallery, Frances Morris, Head of Collections at Tate Modern, and Daniel Birnbaum, Director of the (2009 Venice Biennale and currently at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. KIAF also included several programs that expand on the traditional role of an art fair, such as the Artist Support Program, to support promising new artists for the development of the art market, and the Docent Program and KIDS in KIAF, which help visitors of all ages to better understand modern art. The fair was very well attended, with an upbeat energy through to the last day when reports of last minute sales by several top Korean galleries further buoyed spirits. To be sure, it is of no small significance that South Korea is an open society in a part of the world where authoritarian regimes—albeit dressed in sparkling consumer facades—mostly have the last word. That makes a difference. Journalists don’t have to explain themselves to the authorities or apply for special visas to travel here, exhibitors are not told to fill out government censorship forms for approval of the artwork they show. You can Google anything you want to know on the internet, use the social network of your choice, send email without fear of unforseen consequences for you or the recipient. Moreover, Nobel Peace Prize laureates are not put in jail here. All of this makes 18

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Kim Joon, bird land-bently, 2008. Digital print, 100 x 175 cm. Courtesy: Art Link Gallery, Seoul and KIAF, Seoul

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“Some 160 miles to the north, in the country’s capital city Seoul, another important biennial explores the dialogue between mass media and the human experience in 21st-century society”

South Korea especially fertile ground in the Asia Pacific realm for making, showing and collecting art on an international level. Despite the Confucian influences that pervade so many aspects of daily life in this country, contemporary art is granted a rulebook all its own; and it’s a blank canvas. The city of Gwangju (pop. 1.4 million) hardly seems befitting of its enviable position as the locus for the Korean Peninsula’s most prestigious (and Asia’s oldest) art bienniale. The Gwangju Biennale, begun in 1995 as a tribute to the city’s bloody 1980 political uprising— the Gwangju Massacre—is a telling example of Korea’s ongoing efforts to become the region’s foremost cultural hub. This year’s exhibition takes the title 10,000 Lives in homage to the 30-volume epic poem written during the author Ko Un’s incarceration for his participation in the South Korean democracy movement, which played the tragic role in the city’s eponymous uprising. In the poem, Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), the author attempts to record portraits of every person he had ever met—some 4,000 in total—during his four-year term of solitary confinement. The exhibition, which gathers works by 134 artists from more than 30 countries, explores different approaches to imagemaking since the turn of the 20th century and the cultural ramifications of our society’s obsession with and dependency upon images. 20

The Gwangju Biennale is masterfully executed, from an exhibition-design perspective. Artistic Director Massimiliano Gioni abandons the conventional region-based organization of artists (a practice that in years past had displaced the biennale’s Korean contingent to languish in a secondary venue) and substituted it with a thematic one. The result is by all accounts a success: by subdividing the show into seven distinct sections, Gioni counters the tendency towards Whitakerian “museum legs” endemic to exhibitions of this magnitude. This t r a n s i t i o n f r o m t h e c u s t o m s - o f f i c e t o t h e Kunstkammer as its exhibition model cultivates the atmosphere of a temporary museum rather than a traditional biennale. Indeed, Gioni—whose curatorial belt also bears notches from the Berlin Biennale (2006), Manifesta 5 (2004), as well as the New Museum and the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi (both currently)—has bravely gone where few biennial curators seem to be going these days: namely, curating. In providing such critical contextualization for each section of the show, Gioni ensures that his vision for the exhibition is coherent and decipherable to all audiences and lays a didactic framework within which viewers can actively engage with artworks instead of struggling with an otherwise oblique exhibition concept. The drawings on paper by Guo Fengyi fit neatly, if unexpectedly, into Gioni’s section of works that

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(opposite page) Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Thousand, 2009. 1000 Polaroids mounted on aluminum. Courtesy: David Zwirner, New York and Gwangju Biennial 2010. (above) Street scene in Seoul during KIAF (Korea International Art Fair), 2010. Photo: Macinnis

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City view of Seoul, seen from COEX InterContinental Hotel, during KIAF (Korea International Art Fair), 2010. Photo: Macinnis

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explores the mechanics of vision through optical illusions and “para-scientific imaginaries.” Her anthropomorphic and surrealistic depictions of visions experienced as an outpouring of her practice of Qigong—a pseudoscientific alternative medicine practice, based in mental training and energy flow—are at once self-referential and altogether removed. The images, she claims, derive from metaphysical circumstances, finding expression on paper with the self as a conduit rather than a source. Concepts of cognition, content, and form are wholly out of the picture for Guo, whose sensuous line and abstracted volumes are a means of physical and mental healing rather than conscious creation. sorts, preserving for posterity’s sake the lives of individuals. Tong Binqxue’s album of found photoThe process of healing through images resonates graphs of Ye Jinglu adopts a similar documentary with Alice Kok’s poignant video work Family Script impulse, though perhaps a more narcissistic one. (2008), which activates relationships to images in The album includes 62 portraits of a Chinese busian engrossing fashion by locating itself at the in- nessman, reflecting the sitter’s changes in physical tersection of image and memory. For the piece, appearance in annual increments. While Hseih Kok shuttles messages between family members on examines a “year in the life,” Ye’s photo album either side of the India-Tibet border. Though the shows life itself, reflecting a commitment to Foucault’s messages range from banal to poetic to matter-of- rendering of the archive as a synecdoche for time fact, it is the images that carry the emotional weight itself. Both works, however, direct our own gaze in this piece. Although the physical unity of these inward, forcing viewers to consider the slippery families has been destroyed, their sense of family fleetingness of time and the perilously dichotomous is intact, and in fact is only strengthened through emptiness/permanence of images. their ability to “talk” to one another via a camcorder. The image as a proxy for the self and the These archival tendencies, so much a trend in typattachment to such representations when the real ical “biennial art,” take up residence throughout thing is unattainable imbue this piece with an im- the Gwangju Biennale.Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Thoumediacy and weight that is augmented by Korea’s sand (2009), one thousand polaroids drawn from own geopolitical partition. Kok’s work is certainly the artist’s existing oeuvre and presented in linear one of the most touching and intimate in this form, is topped only by Ydessa Hendeles’s Partners sprawling exhibition, and it offers viewers a much- (The Teddy Bear Project) (2002) in terms of sheer appreciated escape from the isolation of the archival magnitude. Having compiled over 3,000 gallery to the familiar, if gut-wrenching, sense of photographs, ca. 1900-1940, of people with longing we all share. teddy bears, the Canadian curator and collector presents them in a massive floor-to-ceiling immerIssues of documentation and the projected image sive installation executed salon-style, complete with of oneself in absentia also pervade the photo- vitrines full of antique teddy bears and other sungraphic work of Tehching Hseih and Tong Binqxue. dries. One thousand polaroids, 3,000 teddy Hseih’s Punching the Time Clock in the Hour, One bears, 10,000 lives; Gioni’s close examination of Year Performance, April 11, 1980 - April 11, our contemporary obsession with images is a 1981 (1980-81) explores the macro-archival strong showing, an archive of the greatest merit. (read: obsessive-compulsive) process of photographing the artist every hour of every day for a Some 160 miles to the north, in the country’s capyear. Seen as an effort to verify the artist’s existence ital city Seoul, another important biennial explores during his yearlong absence from public life, the dialogue between mass media and the human Hseih’s piece approaches the encyclopedic volume experience in 21st-century society. Media City of Ko Un’s epic poem. Both serve as archives of Seoul (also called the 6th Seoul International

“Of course, the age of Photoshop has jaded us all to the de facto legitimacy of the old adage the camera never lies”

Alice Kok, Family Script, 2008. Three-channel video,18:05. Courtesy: Gwangju Biennial 2010.

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Seoul

“By embracing the ‘city’ aspect of its title, Media City Seoul 2010 edges closer to its original goal of curating a city-wide biennale”

Media Art Biennale) presents 46 artists (10 of which hail from Korea) in an impressive and engaging platform for reflection on society’s increasing dependence upon a variety of media outlets. Under the title of Trust, artistic director Sunjung Kim facilitates new interpretations of the term “media art” in an effort to go beyond the strictures of a “media art biennale.” Trust, it turns out, seems to be an apt title, especially given its irritatingly nondescript nature; our reevaluation of media art as the basis for artistic practice comes under scrutiny along with our response to the mass media and the universal yet enigmatic concept of trust itself. In simpler times, trust in the media was fostered through the frankness and simplicity of photography. Of course, the age of Photoshop has jaded us all to the de facto legitimacy of the old adage “the camera never lies,” yet two artists in Media City Seoul—Miki Kratsman and Noh Suntag— make excellent use of still photography to reveal our society’s growing tendency toward skepticism in the media. Miki Kratsman’s Targeted Killing (2010) investigates the ways in which perceptions of photographic veracity are manipulated when images bear the endorsement of government agencies. By retrofitting a specialty lens (normally used in unmanned, remote-piloted aircraft used by the Israel Defense Forces to assassinate anti-Israeli targets) to his camera, the artist recreates images of such targets (individuals on the ground unaware they are being targeted) just moments before their deaths. Kratsman’s treatment of these types of images—in this case images disseminated by the Israeli Defense Forces via the media to the Israeli public—assumes added gravitas when it is made known that the photographer’s “targets” are Palestinian refugees who presumably never knew what hit them. 26

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Noh Suntag, the strAnge ball, 2004-2007. Pigment print, 80 x 110 cm. Courtesy: Media City Seoul 2010.

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Seoul

“Having compiled over 3,000 photographs, ca. 1900-1940, of people with teddy bears, the Canadian curator and collector presents them in a massive floor-to-ceiling immersive installation executed salon-style, complete with vitrines full of antique teddy bears and other sundries”

Official intelligence images is the jumping-off point for Noh Suntag’s stunning black-and-white photo series the strAnge ball (2004-2007). In this work, the artist, whose themes deal with the prickly political relations between North and South Korea, investigates the identity of a large spherical structure installed in a field on South Korea’s west coast. After a diligent inquiry into the nature and purpose of the “strange ball,” of which even local residents were unaware, he discovered it to be a high-powered radar device operated by the U.S. military. His photographs frame the surveillance machine in ways that betray the gravity of its military nature, creating picturesque, even cinematic, images that provide a platform for reflection. Sarah Morris’s brilliant video work, which was filmed during the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, provides a representation of the city that takes in the full measure of the communist Chinese capital beyond the “Bird’s Nest” and “Water Cube.” In Beijing (2008), Morris presents the kind of media coverage that she would like to see for an event such as the Olympics—along with triumphant images of Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, and the other protagonists of the Games themselves, we also see mundane scenes from the lives of the city’s 22 million inhabitants. Perhaps not surprisingly, these are the images that are most captivating, invoking our own memories of the 2008 Olympic Games, reminding us that media coverage at Ydessa Hendeles Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002. Courtesy: Gwangju Biennale, Seoul

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Sunjung Kim, this year’s director, is the latest in a line of Korean directors, who was aided by Clara Kim of RECAT Los Angeles, Nicolaus Schafhausen of Witte de With Center Rotterdam and Sumitomo Fumihiko of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Media City Seoul, directed by Seoul-based independent curator Sunjung Kim incorporated a total of four venues, including the original 1913 building of a historically important girl’s high school. By embracing the “city” aspect of its title, Media City Seoul 2010 edges closer to its original goal of curating a city-wide biennale. Spreading work across four venues (though the majority is installed in the central Seoul Museum of Art) allowed mega-events such as the Beijing Olympics is highly for audiences to let things marinate (or perhaps selective, raising questions about the public rela- stew, depending on one’s mood), something that tions agendas in play not only by media outlets, is crucial when visiting an exhibition that is over 50% video-based. but the Chinese government itself. In one of the most perplexing but visually alluring works in the show, Korean media artist Yangachi (whose name translates as “gangster” in English) presents his two-channel installation Bright Dove Hyunsook Gyeongseong (2010). The video follows “Miss Hyunsook” through the streets and rooftops of historic Seoul (Gyeongseong was the name of the Korean capital during Japanese colonial times). In the work, the subject, wearing a helmet/perch for a taxodermic pigeon, wanders wordlessly in a world “as experienced through other worlds—those of spirits, birds, ever-changing perspectives,” creating an unsettling but curiously enthralling experience for viewers. All this is underscored by the hypnotic ambience of a free-form Beat Generation jazz soundtrack. The artist’s CCTV-esque cinematographic approach (continually reorienting the camera angle) subversively questions the nature of observation and surveillance, ensnaring viewers in a voyeuristic enchantment; following the protagonist—at times dancing, other times pensive, always exuding a sense of fundamental indecision—we become aware of the ways in which human imperfections come to be exploited by the media.

Altogether, the Korea International Art Fair, (KIAF), the Busan Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale and Media City Seoul build upon the legacies begun when the art scene in Korea was still in its adolescence. The year 2010 brings perhaps the strongest showings any of these projects has ever seen, doing justice to what Tobias Berger, formerly of the Nam June Paik Art Center, has called “probably the most sophisticated art scene in Asia.” While KIAF finished last month, the biennial exhibitions run until early November. These shows are a must-see for anyone interested in what the years ahead will bring. One need only look to the runaway success of the 2009 LACMA/MFAH exhibition “Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea” (also curated by Media City Seoul’s Sunjung Kim) to see where the Korean art scene is headed. To crib from an old Confucian saying: “Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.” If the KIAF, Busan Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, and Media City Seoul are any indication, the preparation is well underway in the Land of the Morning Calm: indications of a bright future indeed. M Street scene in Seoul durng KIAF (Korea International Art Fair), 2010. Photo: Macinnis

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