Monoculture and Its Discontents - Kwangju Biennale 2000 - Statistical Data Included

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Frank Hoffmann

Curatorially, this year's scaled-back Kwangju Biennale offered a resurgence of nationalist identities despite its global theme.

In 1995, the Kwangju Biennale had an auspicious beginning with a spectacular $23-minion budget and a reported 1.6 million visitors [see A.i.A., Apr. '96]. The second version in 1997 still attracted over 900,000 visitors on half that amount [sec A.i.A., July '98]. But a few months later, a financial crisis swept Asia, almost completely freezing the art market for two years. Now that the crash seems to be over, Korea can once more afford to hold megashows. Although Koreans continue to call this the "IMF age," a time of regulatory policies and ongoing layoffs, the art scene finds itself trending upward again.

With 246 artists from 46 countries gathered under the broad theme "Man Space," the Kwangju Biennale 2000 drew diminished, though still impressive, public response. In the course of 71 days (Mar. 29-June 7), over 614,000 visitors were attracted on a $7.2 million budget--comparable to the $8 million in combined governmental and private funding for last year's 48th Venice Biennale. As with the earlier Kwangju projects, a high percentage of the attendees were retired people and school children brought in on bus tours financed by various government agencies.

In addition to the main exhibition, spread throughout two multistory halls of the Biennale center, the event included four major "special exhibitions" focused on human rights, national divisions, and art in the Asian community. A minor special exhibition, "Forest of Human Beings & Forest of Paintings," consisted of a traditional clay wall running between the exhibition venues, along which hundreds of mostly student artists could be seen producing art work.

Three minutes away from the main exhibition hall, the Kwangju City Folk Museum housed "New Media Art," composed chiefly of video installations that attracted very little attention. Here, as in the other Biennale sections, the real superstars were absent, No wonder, then, that many of Seoul's artists, journalists and critics, who earlier this year made a 14-hour flight to see the retrospective of video pioneer Nam June Paik at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, did not bother to visit Kwangju, just an hour's flight from the capital, even though the Biennale is clearly the largest art event in Korea. The city's provincial location may have been a factor, but remoteness does not seem to have harmed other mammoth cultural undertakings, such as the Pusan Film Festival or last April's inaugural Chonju Film Festival, both of which were highly praised by the Korean and international press.

In an interview, Paik Nakchung (Korea's preeminent literary critic and intellectual celebrity, and Jurgen Habermas's partner several years ago in an open discussion about reunification in Germany and Korea) offered a good explanation for Kwangju's designation as the biennial site: "The public thinks that Kwangju deserved something." As the capital and politically restive cultural center of Chollanam-do Province, Kwangju was heavily oppressed under the military dictator Park Chung Hee, who ruled Korea between 1961 and 1979. In May 1980, during the political turbulence following Park's assassination, about 2,000 citizens of all ages were slaughtered by national security forces. Following democratization in the late 1980s and early '90s, Koreans acknowledged that it was Kwangju's turn to host a big cultural event such as the Biennale, and few spoke out about what it might cost.

Originally promoted as an international art exhibition--the first show of its size in Asia--the Kwangju Biennale this time had certain aspects of a Korean folk festival, one that also included international participants who could lend it global exposure and endorsement. A surfeit of mass-entertainment events accompanied the show. While the earlier Kwangju biennials, subtitled "Beyond the Borders" (1995) and "Unmapping the Earth" (1997), aimed to go beyond national and geographic boundaries, curators this year were constrained by often problematic geographic categories. Furthermore, an unacceptably poor standard of English translation marred many of the catalogue texts, and no real attempt was made to address a global audience, or even that of neighboring Asian countries.

Many foreign journalists had difficulty getting into the pre-opening event on Mar. 28, because they had not yet been issued press passes and the guards could not be swayed. Once admitted to the opening proper, critics were astonished by the large blue arrows painted on the floor throughout the main hall and by the pretty guides in miniskirts and high heels who were standing everywhere to direct pedestrian traffic. (Temporary workers hired out by a modeling agency, these hostesses greeted visitors one-by-one with a 90-degree bow and a friendly "please come in," and cautioned those who wandered off the beaten path with a coy "please this way.") The tradeshow extravaganza seemed completely out of place even to Korean observers.