Eliana Willis

The brilliant sunlight was beaming through Mire Lee’s installation on Yeongdo Island. Titled Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Yeongdong Sea (2022), the 70-foot-tall work made of fence fabric draped across scaffolding is on show as part of this year’s Busan Biennale. The roofless abandoned factory of Song Kang Heavy Industrial, where the work was installed, allowed it to stand under a cloudless blue sky.
A tranquil moment of art appreciation was disrupted, however, when exhibition staffers guided the tour group Artnet News was part of to walk away from the structure—for safety reasons. The glorious weather had already made us forget about Typhoon Hinnamnor, which had struck South Korea’s hilly coastal city of Busan just the day before our visit. The powerful tropical cyclone had devastated the southern part of the country and killed at least 10 people.
But the monumental installation by the Amsterdam-based South Korean artist was still standing strong after the raging storm, albeit a little shaky and slightly damaged. It felt like a symbolic gesture that echoed the theme of this year’s Busan Biennale: “We, on the Rising Wave.”
In this case, “rising wave” signifies the history and transformation of Busan, which was the country’s first port open to foreigners in 1876 and a safe haven for over 1 million refugees during the Korean War in 1950–53. And “we,”—be it the participating artists, art practitioners, audiences, or even the city—are still standing despite such rising waves of endless change, locally and abroad. Just like Lee’s work.
Still standing after Typhoon Hinnamnor: Mire Lee, Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Yeongdong Sea(2022). Photo: Vivienne Chow. An image of the work’s original state is at the bottom of this article.
“This is the story of Busan,” Haeju Kim, the artistic director of Busan Biennale 2022, told Artnet News. Taking the helm of the biennale this year offered an extra layer of meaning to Kim, who was born and raised in the city. During her research to prepare for the show, she dived deep into the local histories of her hometown, covering how the city was built and how it has evolved since local elections resumed in 1991, after democracy was fully installed in South Korea in 1987.
“This gives me a chance to take a good look at my city, what it means to me as an individual, and as an art practitioner from here,” noted the curator. “Busan, as a port city, is a starting point for this exhibition. From here, we look for the connection, a common ground for discussion with artists from different parts of the world.”
Art Beyond Seoul
It was indeed refreshing to visit the Busan Biennale following a week of frenzy surrounding Frieze Seoul, launched in partnership with Korea’s long-running homegrown fair Kiaf Seoul. All the glamorous parties, openings, and multimillion-dollar sales had undoubtedly made Seoul an exciting place to be, but the tranquility of Busan was where one could let art sink in.
Such tranquility may or may not have been welcomed by the organizers, however, since the opening of this year’s biennale fell on the same date as the opening of Frieze Seoul and Kiaf, and many trips to Busan were postponed or canceled due to the typhoon.
The biennale was founded in 1999, and as the host of one of South Korea’s most notable international art exhibitions, the city of Busan has been playing a tremendous role in not just the organization but also the narrative of the show. The support was rounded out by this year’s curatorial advisors, Christine Tohme, Philippe Pirotte, and Yuk Hui.
One of the works by Oh U-Am (b. 1938) on show at Busan Biennale. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
This year’s biennial features 64 artists and art collectives, born from the 1930s to 1990s, from 26 countries, with 46 (or 63 percent) of them based outside of South Korea.
The show spans four different locations that carry specific meanings to the city’s transformation. The Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (MOCA Busan), which has been a main exhibition venue since the museum’s inception in 2018, is located on Eulsukdo Island, which was once Asia’s largest habitat for migratory birds, but the environment was severely damaged because of accelerated industrialization and urbanization. Pier 1 of Busan Port, which was completed in 1912, was the transportation hub during Japan’s invasion of China and the Korean War, but was excluded from the city’s current North Port redevelopment project. And the other two locations, Yeongdo and Choryang, played significant roles during the Korean War, since both were homes to refugees.
According to artistic director Kim, exhibition locations—as well as the artists—were selected to address the exhibition’s four thematic focuses: “Migration,” “Women and Women Laborers,” “Ecosystem of the City,” and “Technological Change and Locality.”
“There were some personal factors when I decided to look at Busan through the lens of these four focuses,” Kim noted. “Many people, for example, have already forgotten how the population of Busan was made of migration. A lot of mixed recipes can be found in the local food culture. The city is mountainous but it was quickly occupied by migrants and houses were built along the hilly landscape.”
Although the majority of featured artists were based abroad, Kim hoped that by having Busan as a point of departure in the exhibition and in her discussion with artists, would allow a “more relevant identity of Busan under a larger context to be rebuilt.”
Song Minjung, Custom (2022), on show at Choryang, a new venue of Busan Biennale 2022. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Four Themes in One
Despite the biennial’s four distinctive focuses, there are no separations or any obvious boundaries drawn among the works. Rather, they are all laid out in a lyrical and sometimes poetic way, as if they were in dialogue with each other, telling stories that are related across time and space. Different images are juxtaposed alongside each other, addressing more than one focus at the same time.
Indeed, these four focuses should not be isolated from each other. The memorable exhibition at MOCA Busan’s basement level space, for example, is a thoughtfully curated journey that begins with rarely seen paintings from the 1990s to 2000s by the Korean artist Oh U-Am (b. 1938). He was orphaned during the Korean War and painted the seemingly childlike yet somber images out of his childhood memories of the country’s liberation from Japanese imperial rule, and people’s suffering in the aftermath of the Korean War.
This is followed by a journey through works that attempt to revive the memories of a forgotten past. Danish artist Pia Rönicke (b. 1974) tells the story of Le Klint, a woman who made the famous pleated lamp shades in installation set In Without a Name (2004–07), but never received the credit for it. (Rönicke has another brilliant work, In Future Horizon, that tells the history of military conflicts in the region through the stories of plants showing on the museum’s first floor.)
Korean-Dutch Sara Sejin Chang (b. 1977) recounts the painful history of transnational and transracial adoption of Korean children, who were sold and transported to other countries—with Busan serving as an epicenter of child traffickers in the 1970s and 80s—in the film installation Four Months, Four Million Light Years (2020).
French artist Laure Prouvost (b. 1978) reminds us of our watery origins from a mother’s womb in her 2022 video work Four For See Beauty, which is accessed through a mysterious tunnel of palm trees made with leaves from Jeju Island.
The basement level exhibition concluded at South Korean artist Kim Jooyoung’s (b. 1948) Way-abyss (1994), a notable work hanging on the wall that was essentially a pathway for lost souls made by footsteps in black ink left on a white cotton cloth. The piece is an apt representation of her practice, revolving around the themes of departure and stemmed from her growing up during the division of the Korean peninsula. A similar theme is explored in her stunning recent work The Archeology of Pier 1: Wave Becomes Light. Becomes Wind. Becomes the Way. Becomes History (2022), on show at Pier 1 of Busan Port.
Kim Jooyoung, The Archeology of Pier 1: Wave Becomes Light. Becomes Wind. Becomes the Way. Becomes History (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Busan Biennale.
Off the Beaten Track
Of the four locations, the abandoned house up on the hill of Choryang that was turned into a temporary exhibition space is a must-go experience for adventurous art lovers. The Busan-born South Korean artist Song Minjung’s (b. 1985) transformed the site into quirky show. (It is also fortunate that the typhoon did not seem to have caused a great deal of damage to the two-storey building.) Her work Custom follows a mysterious story told via various video clips shown on different smartphones, as if the fictional characters are video-calling each other.
The exhibition location, from which visitors can enjoy a great view of the city, was an experiment as it was new to the biennale, and Song’s work explored the uneasy dynamics of the relationship between Korea and Japan inherited from a problematic historical past.
The relationship between Korea and Japan was given a more positive note by the Japanese art collective Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group, who invented a new beverage called “Doburokgeolli,” which was designated the official alcoholic drink of this year’s Busan Biennale. Free bottles of the mysterious dark beverage, held in a fridge housed in a hut in Yeongdo, were the outcome of an experiment. They were made with Japan’s technique of brewing Doburoku sake with the malt of Geumjeongsanseong Makgeolli, a traditional alcohol from Busan.
The artists argue that the two alcoholic drinks share a lot of similarities, including a crackdown on home-brewing by their respective countries’ governments. The creation of this new hybrid drink is meat to carry a symbolic meaning of how the relationship between these two cultural powerhouses of east Asia could move forward from their troubled history.
A new alcoholic beverage fusing Korean and Japanese traditional brewing techniques, invented by Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group, the “official” drink of the 2022 Busan Bieannle. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Like the work by Chim↑Pom, artistic director Kim has a lot of hope for the future, particularly for her hometown.
“Busan deserves more attention, not just in Korea but also internationally,” Kim said. “Most of the global attention centers around Seoul, but Busan is getting better, and becoming a city that inspires artists.”
The Busan Biennale 2022 runs until November 6. A series of public programs and screenings of moving image works at the Yeongdo Outdoor Cinema can be found here.
How it looked originally: Mire Lee, Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Yeongdong Sea (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Busan Biennale.
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Rows of tents sheltering migrants and other unhoused people stretch out in the electric blue light beneath Lyon’s bridges and underpasses. Outside the city, the cornfields are bleached by a summer of extreme heat. Conflict, climate catastrophe and the human movement they precipitate touch us all, even in this wealthy French city. Under the curatorial direction of Till Fellrath and Sam Bardaouil, our interconnected vulnerability has become the presiding theme of the 16th edition of the Biennale de Lyon. The show’s theme, “Manifesto of Fragility,” the curators suggest, positions fragility as “a generative form of resistance” and vulnerability as “a foundation for empowerment.”
The biennial is vast, as is now de rigueur for such shows. It is like an art-world Man v. Food: Do you attempt to consume everything and make yourself ill, or can you pick and choose? (Alas, no one has yet invented a doggy bag for biennial art.) From the central venue—the cavernous Usines Fagor, a former household appliance factory—it spreads across the city’s museums, from the Musée d’art contemporain (MAC) de Lyon to the wonderful, brutalist Lugdunum museum of Roman antiquities.
Artefacts—many broken, or unfashionable—dating back three millennia are scattered between contemporary works throughout the biennial. The participating artists, living and dead, reflect Fellrath and Bardaouil’s years of immersion in art of the Arab world.
Biennale de Lyon curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. Photo: © Blandine Soulage.
It’s been a busy year for the curators. In January, they took up a double-headed role as directors of the Hamburger Bahnhof. In March, their passion project, “Beirut and the Golden Sixties”, opened at Berlin’s Gropius Bau. (The show has now moved to Lyon, where it forms part of the Biennale.) April saw the opening of the Venice Biennale, for which they worked with Yasmina Reggad on artist Zineb Sedira’s Silver Lion-award winning French Pavilion installation. And throughout it all, they have been working on the Biennale de Lyon, which should have opened in 2021 but was delayed because of the pandemic.
Fragility may be the theme, but art-wise this Biennale feels robust—extensive, expansive, expensive, even a little excessive. At Usines Fagor, artists and their work luxuriate in an abundance of space. Eva Fabregas’s biomorphic teats and bulges dangle in fleshy magnificence from the rafters. The Marta Górnicka’s film of a diverse choir “stress testing” the German constitution is broadcast at top volume. Dana Awartani has installed a 20-meter reproduction of the patterned courtyard floor of Aleppo’s Grand Mosque, its bricks made from colored clays.
Installation view of “Manifesto of Fragility,” Biennale de Lyon 2022, Hans Op de Beeck’s We Were the Last to Stay (2022). © Adagp, Paris, 2022. Photo: Blandine Soulage.
One whole warehouse is occupied by Hans Op de Beeck’s We Were the Last to Stay, a trailer park complete with river and statue of the Virgin Mary, all sprayed ashen grey, like a contemporary Pompeii. A neighboring warehouse hosts Julian Charrière’s videos of ice scapes and meltwater, flanking a perforated boulder of marble positioned on its own core samples. Both presentations are spectacular, though this stately beauty almost feels obscene.
There’s a lot of slow-paced video, in which lush panning shots are matched to portentous voice-overs. Ambient music in a minor key washes throughout. It can feel like your emotions are being curated too, or you’re stuck in a sentimental video game.
Many grand audio-visual works are so caught up in their own beauty that they forget to go anywhere, but a few work brilliantly. Phoebe Boswell’s dwelling (2022) immerses you in a swimming pool with a succession of Black families, lovers, and siblings as they float and play in the brilliant blue. There is a long legacy of trauma in the Black body’s relationship to water. Even today, many Black British adults don’t swim. Boswell’s moving work invites us to share space with people as they explore water as a medium of physical freedom and transformation.
Installation view of “Manifesto of Fragility,” Biennale de Lyon 2022, Ugo Schiavi, Grafted Memory System (2022). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: © Blandine Soulage.
Installed in an old chapel, Mali Arun’s three-screen Wunderwelten (2022) weirds up the familiar world of a theme park, using an (infrared?) filter to turn everything colored green to magenta. We follow a young girl through a joyous visit, charting her facial expressions as she reaches a peak of awe and ecstasy on a rollercoaster—in the mode of Bernini’s St Teresa, complete with churchy music. Arun’s celebration of child-like wonder links entertainment to religious experience, suggesting the former now occupies the cultural space once held by the latter.
Planning for the Biennale had already started when, on 4 August 2020, an explosion tore through the Port of Beirut. For “Beirut and the Golden Sixties,” showing here at MAC Lyon, Fellrath and Bardaouil commissioned a devastating intervention from Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.
After many galleries of captivating historic work—psychedelic surrealism from Georges Doche and Juliana Seraphim, sexy sculptures by Dorothy Salhab Kazemi, coded embroidery by Nicolas Moufarrege included—we step into a ring of screens. Each replays two minutes of CCTV footage taken from a different vantage point in Beirut’s Sursock Museum as the blast rips through the galleries, shatters the stained glass on the facade and knocks a bride off her feet in the sculpture garden.
The piece is positioned for maximum impact, after you’ve emotionally invested in the work of so many mid-century Lebanese artists. It’s like being given a puppy then learning the rest of the litter is dead.
Installation view of “Beirut and the Golden Sixties,” at Martin Gropius Bau. Photo: © Luca Girardini.
“Beirut and the Golden Sixties” is a great exhibition, but an odd change of pace; it is pedagogic, archival, historically immersed. It’s a proper institutional show in the midst of Biennale flurry.
On the floor above, a conceptual display uses the life of Louise Brunet, a 19th-century silk weaver and workers’ rights activist from Lyon who ended up in Lebanon, as a structure through which to explore health, poverty, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. There is some good work here—canvases by the late Semiha Berksoy, a creepy giant asparagus sculpture by Hannah Levy, paintings by Salman Toor, palpable photographs of dead octopuses by Richard Learoyd—but too many competing ideas at a curatorial level.
The Beirut explosion also bisects an inventive video installation by Rémie Akl, who greets us while she dresses for a party, and invites us to follow her across a series of screens. Following the blast, the work turns into a quest to hack into a locked iPhone. The inaccessible device illustrates the disruption caused by the loss of contemporary infrastructure, but also performs as a metaphor for a corrupt system.
Installation view of “Manifesto of Fragility,” Biennale de Lyon 2022, Gómez-Egaña Virgo, (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman Gallery. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Insecurity is given symbolic form in Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s Virgo (2022), an apartment-like structure with furnishings set on mobile tracks, which are slowly propelled through a succession of rooms by performers. And in Lucy McRae’s elegant laboratory-set film Institute of Isolation (2016) the artist goes through lonely training and testing as though preparing for a solo space mission, her experiments in isolation a poignant precursor to the pandemic.
Among the breakout stars of this edition are Giulia Andreani, whose uncanny tableaux of forgotten and fantastical women’s histories are painted in Payne’s grey, and Zhang Yungao, who also paints in a reduced palette but on felt, which gives a nostalgic fuzziness to his exploration of BDSM iconography. The Biennale is likely to be transformative for Sylvie Selig, now in her 80s, who brings a fully-formed universe of weird humanoid figures assembled from seedpods, bones and other detritus, as well as suites of narrative embroideries and paintings.
Fellrath and Bardaouil are storytellers. For Lyon, they have, with a few notable exceptions, favored art that delivers narrative and drama—big emotion, grand gestures. This is Biennale as balm rather than irritant, a woozily soundtracked counterbalance to the prevailing feel-bad tendency, all pearl and very little grit.
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