Week 9

2018 GWANGJU BIENNALE

CEO

Sun Jeong Kim is a woman CEO of Gwangju Biennale and also takes charge of the director of Art Sunje Center in Seoul. It is quite interesting that the CEO and the director of an art institution is a woman.

Curator

There are 6 women executives (Clara Kim, Christine Y. Kim, Rita Gonzalez, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Yeon Shim Chung, Yeewan Koon) and 5 men executives (David Teh, Man Seok Kim, Sung Woo Kim, Chong-Ok Paek, B.G.Muhn)

Clara Kim who is one of the curators gave an interview about her work.

She curated ‘Imagined Countries / Modern Utopia’. She focused some movement that tried to build the new world by constructing new cities, so that we can see inspiring building from the past to the future. She said, “Every building has the history.”

Artists

Various international artists are committed to show artworks in 7 main themes.

Sarpinteros, Francis Alys, Ala Younis, Kader Attia, Ho Tzu Nyen, Shilpa Gupta, Dinh Q. Le, etc…

One of our classmates has counted kindly the artists’ gender ratio. It would be like 2:3 between male and female.

Impressed Artwork

I could find an artwork, ‘100 Hand drawn maps of my country’, by Shilpa Gupta.

There is a personal reason why I was impressed, which means, I am one of the participants. Last semester, I visited Art Sunje Center to conduct an interview of a curator. After we’ve done with the interview and shared some conversations, we were asked to draw a map of Korean Peninsula. She said, “Oh, why don’t you draw a map, it will be displayed on Gwangju Biennale in October.’ So we said yes why not, and we drew it. Actually I totally forgot about what happened in the museum right after I walked out from there and about 6 months later, I finally face what I drew. It was just a line among clouds of drawings, but I was touched that I can be a part of the exhibition.

Personal Opinion

2018 Gwangju Biennale shows various creative artworks with interesting theme. Some of them do matter with our real lives, like A.I and development of science. As the subject of the report is about gender, I concentrated on how gender works in an exhibition.

It can be a kind of prejudice, I thought men are reasonable, and women are emotional and sensitive. However what I found was different. Female artists focused on what historical fact and delivered some messages that it is also happening nowadays. Male artists suggest the new idea of art. For example, a game ‘Founder’ was very interesting. It contains the history of New Zealand invasion and the artist converts it as the space invasion.