Media_City Seoul - Brand News - Brief Article

JEAN BAUDRILLARD is just one of the headliners participating in this year's Media_City Seoul, the second installment of the Korean biennial, on view at the Seoul Museum of Art through November 24. But despite achieving a kind of Baudrillardian simulacrum of the new-media biennial roster (the man himself appears as symposium speaker), the event seems so brand-name-conscious on the surface that it's difficult to detect its underlying point. Marquee figures in electronic art and music, like Nam June Paik and Bjork, have contributed work; organizers include curator Dan Cameron (of and Sara Diamond, artistic director of media and visual arts at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

"The word media is a way to 'brand' this biennial from the others, giving it a distinct character," explains the event's artistic director, Wonil Rhee. (Korea hosts two other major biennials, in Kwangju and Pusan.) The first Media_City Seoul, with its broad mandate to examine how art, technology, and industry intersect, was criticized for lacking cohesion. This year's exhibition, striving for fresh commentary beyond new media's now stale novelty, is "more focused to appeal to the general public," Rhee says. But is appealing to the general public enough of a focus? If a medium-centric exhibition seems more trade show than thought-provoking survey, at least there will be engaging individual works to see--such as Korean-born Cody Choi's database paintings, which incorporate details from architectural plans taken from a digitized collection of images--that should prompt us to contemplate this art's place in the post-Internet-boom culture.

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