Photologue | Spring’s Wave and Sound

This spring, art events involving multiple genres are being held in Korea. Festival Bo:m (directed by Sunghee Kim) is an annual multi-genre art festival that has been hosted for the past six years and continues to draw critical acclaim from audiences. When Festival Bo:m began in 2007 (under the title Spring Festival), it was geared toward introducing international trends of dance and theatre art to Korea. Over the years, the festival has developed its own character, and this year Bo:m tried to strike a balance between Western and non-Western art. During the festival’s three-week run, I viewed works by both Korean and foreign artists. One thing that stood out in my mind at the 2012 Festival Bo:m was the collaborative nature of many of the projects.

Another multi-genre art event, 'x_sound: John Cage, Nam June Paik and After', curated by Sohyun Ahn, Sooyoung Lee, and Chaeyoung Lee, is taking place at the Nam June Paik Art Center. The event includes not only works by Cage and Paik, but also works by present-day sound artists building on the experimentations of the original innovators. Here, the term 'x_sound' has a triple meaning: a sound that is unknown (x), that is ex-panded, and that ex-pels fixed ideas about sound. 'Sound' itself is a neutral and straightforward term when taken literally, but in the contemporary art context, it is a complex field with innumerable questions and discourses.

The final exhibition is Nayoungim + Gregory Maass's 'There is No Beer in Hawaii', curated by Sunyoung Oh at artclub 1563. The exhibition’s central theme is illusion. Its title comes from the German schlager song ‘Es Gibt Kein Bier auf Hawaii.’ Their works are based on a variety of art trends ranging from pop art to neo-dada, fluxus, conceptual art, and minimalism, but the artists display a free command of those art trends. Their works are familiar in the sense that they borrow ideas from art history, but at the same time, they are unfamiliar due to the neutral colors and materials used to create them.

 

 

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