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.
Chen Xiaoyun
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관리자 2024-11-29 15:18
Night/2.4 km, 2009, single-channel video, colour, silent, 9min. 30sec.
FIRE-3000KG, 2009, single-channel video, colour, silent, 9min. 50sec.
Chen Xiaoyun has been a significant force in the Hangzhou video art community. His work is often described as ‘poetic’, but perhaps ‘hypnotic’ would be a more accurate term for the way he stages, with non-professional actors’ absurd situations which recount moments drawing upon China’s ascent into modernisation, and their discontents. The single-channel video works, Night/2.4KM (2009) and FIRE-3000KG (2009), are both scenes filmed in the enigmatic dead of the night. They are actions that ambiguously refer to scenes of revolt. In Night/2.4KM, there appear to be peasants or working-class people, marching without facial expression, carrying makeshift weaponry. FIRE-3000KG is a haunting rendering of the action of book burning. Of course, the mass assembly points to the disturbing aspects of action as dissolved into collectivity without question. Instead, the artist confronts us with these moments, their history, their more and more iconic aesthetics acquired over times of recurrence. As re-enactments of scenes from collective memory, Chen Xiaoyun examines the aesthetics of (imminent) violence and the imaginative source of terror and torture embedded deep within us all. He questions whether the hallucinatory quality of these aesthetics can become its own force for self-subversion.
Chen Xiaoyun
