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

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Frank Hoffmann

The few Australian works in the section were unnecessarily isolated in a separate room away from the Korean exhibits. Here Patricia Piccinini's installation stood out thanks to the charm of its satire. Two cute boy-blue and girl-pink Truck Babies (1999)--4-foot-high fiberglass models of semi tractor cabs--evoked the relationship between nature, artificiality and consumption. On a video behind them, a Japanese teenage girl invited you to "become the truck that you admire." Eerily attractive, she seemed like the embodiment of the virtual generation, a cyborg.

The Korea/Oceania section as a whole suffered from too many compromises. Did human-fights art really belong in this show when the Biennale also had an entire special exhibition devoted to the topic? And where were the many important young artists who have powered the South Korean art scene over the last two or three years, including such brilliant female practitioners as Ium and Lee Bul (Korea's representative at the last Venice Biennale)--artists whom Kim has wisely shown in her earlier exhibitions?

As part of his Special Corner project, artistic director Oh Kwangsu installed on the edge of the Korea/Oceania section a room filled with large-scale, abstractly patterned brush paintings by Suh Se-ok. Intended to modulate between curatorial areas and tie the show's components together, Oh's five interventions (one for each geographical section) featured work by a total of nine international artists in a wide variety of mediums. All five were panned in the Korean press for taking up too much space or for violating the ambience of the sections they bordered.

Oh is especially unpopular among politically engaged artists from Kwangju and the Cholla provinces. In late 1998, the biennial oversight committee dropped the leftist art critic Ch'oe Min as planned artistic director and replaced him with Oh. This action, along with Oh's appointment as the new director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, led to harsh criticism from several artists' groups. They publicly accused him of having worked with the former dictatorship to help shut down the activities of Minjung artists and the pro-democracy movement during the 1980s, when he was an influential critic and professor of art with membership on several key government cultural committees. Oh has dismissed these accusations, calling them groundless.

North America

The North America section was this Biennale's most distinctive curatorial flop. Commissioner Thomas Finkelpearl of P.S. 1 in New York decided to tailor this section to the unique context of the Kwangju Biennale, where most of the visitors would be retired people, school children or families making weekend jaunts to enjoy the live pop concerts, dance performances and poetry readings associated with the festival. He told this interviewer. "A million people are going to see the show, and 970,000 of them are not from the art world. So I wanted to do something for the 970,000 people.... It's very site-specific, I would not do this show in Venice or in Sydney." But Finkelpearl may have overreacted when he decided that the big, dramatic installations so common these days in other international biennials would not appeal to the Kwangju audience. Some visitors, in fact, felt betrayed by his choice.