20th century AD

Art in America, April, 1996 by Eleanor Heartney

There are few better laboratories for a study of the interpenetration of art and politics than the international biennial. South Korea's recent Kwangju Biennale is a case in point. One week after the Biennale's close last November, the Korean government announced the reopening of an investigation into the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, in which government troops fired on unarmed civilians and caused a still-undetermined number of deaths. (The official tally of 192 has long been disputed by unofficial reports which place the toll in the thousands.) The announcement was seen by some commentators as an effort to divert attention from a burgeoning corruption crisis which has landed one former president in jail and threatens to touch the current administration. But it was also clearly motivated by the same forces that convinced government and private funders to mount a major international exhibition in a region of Korea otherwise little visited by outsiders. Like the investigation, the Kwangju Biennale was conceived as a symbol of President Kim Young-Sam's commitment, as the first nonmilitary leader in Korea since the Japanese occupation, to a more open and democratic society. It also represented an effort to exorcise the lingering ghosts of the 1980 massacre.

Thus, in ways that were not always obvious to outside visitors, the Biennale's form and location were greatly shaped by internal concerns. The influx of money and attention was designed to soften traditional antagonisms between Seoul and this historically rebellious region. And the officially sanctioned celebration of Kwangju and its history served as an announcement that the days of political repression belong irrevocably to the past.

At the same time, the Biennale also had an international agenda. Jostling to position it as the Asian biennial (although one this year in Shanghai and an upcoming biennial in Hong Kong may challenge that standing), the organizers, under the leadership of National Museum director Lim Young-Bang and artistic director Lee Young-Woo, invited 92 artists from 50 countries to participate in its core exhibition. Meanwhile, a series of satellite shows highlighted Asian and particularly Korean achievements in contemporary art, traced the impulse toward political art in the West from Picasso to the present, applauded Korea's own tradition of political art and revealed Asia's full participation in contemporary explorations of art and technology. The objective of the whole was to burnish Korea's reputation as a powerful emergent force in the international cultural scene.

However, visitors plunged into the opening chaos might be forgiven for thinking that Kwangju was not quite ready for prime time. Artists complained about their difficulties in completing even simple installations, and a number of works were never completed. Meanwhile, confusion caused by the scarcity of multilingual guides, technical difficulties with various electronic works, the unavailability of catalogues and press materials and the lack of adequate transportation between the two main exhibition sites made for a more than usually difficult viewing experience for opening visitors. The problems seemed to stem from lack of communication between the Seoul-based organizers and local officials ill equipped for such a massive onslaught of international visitors, and from the failure to adequately estimate the amount of time needed to put together a project on this scale.

But despite these problems, the Biennale offered a wealth of provocative art, interesting emerging artists and new (at least to this observer) information on modern and contemporary Korean art. The core exhibition was titled "Beyond the Borders," signaling the now de rigueur rejection of notions of border, center and national identity, in favor of displacement and cultural hybridity. The selections were made by a team of international curators, one each for seven regions of the world, with a focus on emerging artists.

While there were a few biennial regulars, there were also many fresh faces. By abandoning the notion of Venice-style national pavilions, the new biennials cropping up in such unexpected corners of the globe as Johannesburg, Istanbul and Kwangju seem less beholden to national politics and freer to make unconventional choices. At the same time, however, they have a tendency to choose artists who reinforce the outside world's vision of cultural "authenticity."

Thus, for instance, Cameroon was represented by a set of bottle trees and fetishes by Pascale Martine Tayou that were pieced together from wood scraps, old socks, paint cans, doll heads and other bits of flotsam and jetsam. South African artist Kay Hassan contributed a pulsating mural depicting rural life in his country. Assembled from torn fragments of colorful posters and billboards, his painting offered a striking image of folk life in a folk style. In a similar manner, the folk style of Eastern Europe is suggested by the intricate geometric patterning in Polish artist Zofia Kulik's photomontages. In a surprisingly successful subversive maneuver, Kulik counters the sweetness of these formal compositions by building them out of images of modern missiles, skulls, naked dancers and spear heads.