"Media_city Seoul 2000"

ArtForum, Nov, 2000 by Barry Schwabsky

"City Vision/Clip City," curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, made use of many of the seventy or so giant electronic billboards spread throughout the city to take video outside the enclosed space of the gallery and insert it into the hubbub of daily life. What makes this venture apt is that it exploits one of the great drawbacks of life in Seoul: The crowded city suffers from some of the slowest traffic you'll ever have the misfortune to experience. So the silent video clips that were introduced into the usual round of ads had a captive audience of commuters waiting to inch forward toward the next intersection. Most of the works--by Thomas Demand, Alexander Kluge, Nam June Paik (the sole participant in both "Media Art 2000" and "City Vision"), and twenty-two other artists, architects, filmmakers, and collaborative teams--seemed concerned to go against the grain of the advertising that surrounded them by reinserting a sense of subjective experience (sometimes witty, sometimes melancholy) into the public realm. In P ipilotti Rist's Open My Glade, 2000 (which debuted in New York's Times Square last year), for instance, the artist appears to be trapped inside the screen. One work, filmmaker Song Ilgon's Flush, 2000, seems to have given the city more subjective experience than it could stomach. Inspired by a recent report in the Korean press, Song's spot was a rapidly montaged portrait of a young girl giving herself an abortion in a public restroom. But its opening shots, with the camera looking down from above on the girl's face, are ambiguous: Her intense, openmouthed expression at first seemed like that of a porn star simulating an orgasm. By the time you're clued in to the girl's suffering, you'd already become the voyeur, which provoked a feeling of complicity in the girl's predicament. I suspect it was this, more than the subject itself or even the relatively oblique presentation of the bloody details, that elicited public complaint; Song's work was removed from its rotation on the billboards almost as soon as it was shown. (It continued to be screened within the confines of the museum, along with the other "City Vision" clips.)

There's nothing mysterious about the desire within the highly developed Korean art scene for closer connections to an international dialogue. After all, the large numbers of Korean artists who have studied and worked in France, the United States, or, increasingly, Germany know Western art firsthand, not just from books and magazines. And of course the country's prosperity provides an economic basis for such a linkage as well. Yet one could question the apparent segregation in "Media_City": The local artists and the locally connected curator stayed underground, while curators airlifted into town showed mostly Western artists in the museum and on the electronic billboards. But at least those Asian artists who were included in the "international" segments clearly appeared as the equals of their generally better known Western counterparts. A real glimpse of the digital future conjured by a phrase like "media city" was provided by two separate segments of the event: "Media Entertainment," a showcase of commercial technology, and "Digital Alice," which featured putatively educational programs for children. For the most part, the contents of these segments were outside the realm of anything that counts, so far, as art--which is where the digital realm still seems to lead much of the time. The media focus helps "brand" this new biennial at a time when it's become hard to keep track of so many, but the theme could also have swamped the show in gimmickry. Fortunately, sensitive curating of the individual segments proved more powerful than their overall tendency to work at cross-purposes.