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

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Frank Hoffmann

Indeed, were it not for the large-scale posters that read "Man Space" in English and Chinese (meaning "humanity" if the two original characters are combined) and "Welcome to the Kwangju Biennale 2000," the opening ceremony could easily have been mistaken for the ribbon-cutting for a new highway. The speeches sounded like progress reports, and Ch'a Pom-sok, the Kwangju Biennale Foundation chairperson, declared that the main purpose of the Biennale was to "strengthen the competitiveness of our nation and the [Cholla] region."

Art & Sex

For many viewers, the highlight of the Biennale was the special exhibition "Human Beings & Gender," which featured 16 Koreans among the 35 participating artists. A more descriptive title for this show would have been "Art, Gender, Sex," the theme of a special feature article about this survey in the popular Korean monthly magazine art. Housed in the Education and Public Relations Center, the exhibition was identified by what looked like several giant, colorful condoms waving on the building top in place of the national flag. Sculptures grouped in the open space in front of the center included large wooden phalluses and representations of copulating genitalia that resemble Korean shamanist ritual paraphernalia. In some cases, the works were "updated" with allusions to cybersex (e.g., computer mice attached to a wooden phallus). As one might imagine, busloads of youngsters on school excursions found this area a memorable backdrop for taking group photographs.

The largest outdoor work was a four-tier pyramidal cage, Puffed-up (2000) by Chang T'ae-sik, containing 39 symmetrically positioned androidal clay men, each enclosed within a metal cell. All the figures have holes where their genitals should be. Chang reportedly intended the piece as a comment on "the process of understanding the teachings of God," but anthropologist James Thomas set a slightly different tone when he summed it up in conversation as "eerily futuristic ... identical, castrated cyborgs in cells. Is this what's in store for the post-Dolly, genetically engineered Third Millennium?"

Curators So Chong-gol (Korea) and Marie-Laure Bernadac (France) had complementary visions. According to So, "the core concept of this exhibition [was] to retrospect the history of [the] conceptual development of sex in Korea." Bernadac, meanwhile, sought "to stress the question of identity, of the redefinition of feminine and masculine roles and attributes."

Inside the center, one room contained reproductions of small erotic paintings and illustrations from East Asian dynastic times, along with almost 100 clay figurines from Korean prehistory engaged in various forms of sexual intercourse (none of which were shown in the catalogue). Although it may have been only a footnote to the exhibition, this gallery nicely demonstrated how far South Korea has come in the last 10 yeas, A decade ago, when numerous unmistakably pornographic images created by 18th-century and colonial-period (1910-45) Korean painters were "discovered" in a Japanese collection, indignant Korean art critics dismissed the works as forgeries. Now these paintings are on display for everyone to enjoy. Until the 1980s, reigning notions of Confucian propriety effectively censored nude paintings, except for those idealized figures which represented Korea's adoption of the Western mystique of the female body's artistic beauty. Despite rampant Westernization, significant gains in women's rights since the 1980s and a now booming market in pornographic movies, one still rarely sees Korean art that engages gender identity, homosexuality, transvestism or sexual commerce.