Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition

Posted in Korean Art by James Turnbull on May 12, 2008

( “PERMA N STANT 6″ by displace)

In my quest to find the original, creative and/or quirky in Korean life, I’ve decided that I’m not going to confine myself just to examples in Korea, which would deny me the opportunity to write about the numerous examples of Korean art exhibited outside of the country by Koreans too. While I’d be the last person to pretend that Korea is well-known for fostering original art, it being telling that most of the Korean artists mentioned here and here are based overseas for instance, some of them do still live in Korea, and would be good starting points for further investigation into the Korean art world. I also think that there’s much more out there than just what’s available in English too, and I’ll try to find and hopefully translate more Korean-language sources on art from now on.

( “PERMA N STANT 5″ by displace)

Today’s pictures, from the Korean “PERMA N STANT” display at the 2006 Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition, actually I found just while surfing through Flickr. Below is an abstract of the Korean display that the photographer provided:

The practice of architecture and urbanism in Korea, as is the case with any other typical contemporary society, are engaging more and more closely with reality, in a much more complicated way than before. In this regard, we find that Cities, Architecture and Society, the theme of the Biennale, parallels our particular concerns to summarize the ways current architectural and urban issues involve our society. This year’s participating architects took part in numerous debates and sessions before extracting the following thematic phrase for the show: ‘cumulated time, and instant events in the old places’; or other words, ‘perma n stant’ (possibly, permanent + instant).

As one of the oldest modern metropolitan areas with more than 600 years of history, Seoul still energetically thrives as a huge buffer where the old ideas and substances collide every hour with the most updated ones. This city with its self-conflicting nature should consequently integrate largely unpredictable, unexpected patterns of townscapes and lifestyles. So here one could not help but witness all the mutated, temporary versions of urban scenes and events, and how intriguingly the recognitions and emotions of its occupations work. The city exposes its marginal layer of time-cumulated strata when the innumerable thin layers of instant events incessantly tints its surface.

The first part of the theme perma supposedly epitomizes all the characteristics and fundamental geographical elements the city has with relatively constant nature, while the latter part, n stant could suggest all its present momentary and adaptable images and shifts.

The teamed-up project is a combined display of large scale sectional models and moving pictures taken from five different sectors of the city. Its size and population have provided numerous documents of how its extreme topographies have been overcome. In one of the five individual projects, a modernist architect shows how he perceives a traditional district and has painstakingly adapted his works to it over the decade; the second one, with the theme of ‘city in a city’, diagnoses insecure alterations deriving from the fringe of the city. The third interprets volatile properties of urban surfaces, while the fourth, with the theme of ‘catalog city’, makes various indications about futuristic housing based on the ways today’s commercial housing suppliers acutely interact with their customers. The last one takes on the intricate urban web of artificial nerves and sensory devices and their everyday data, being accumulated and analysed through its dwellers who can never avoid being constantly exposed to the systems.

There’s only 7 pictures of the display available on Flickr, beginning here (and 89 of the exhibition itself here), but the photographer links to this site with more.