Seoul Hosts Media Art Biennale in September
By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter
Seoul will turn into ``media city'' in September, as it plays host to the 5th Seoul International Media Art Biennale.
Also known as Media City Seoul 2008, the biennale will showcase how art and technology meet in innovative works by artists from all over the world. It opens Sept. 11 at the Seoul Museum of Art and will run for 55 days through Nov. 5.
Sixty-nine artists from 26 countries, including Korea, Japan, China, Australia, France, United States, Netherlands and Denmark, have been invited to present their works at the event.
Park Il-ho, exhibition director and professor at Ewha Womans University, said this year's main theme is ``Turn and Widen" referring to the growing influence of media art around the world.
``The theme is based upon the fact that media art has been greatly influential on changes and expansion of aesthetic experience by drawing and turning new forms of media into art. The exhibition will categorize the differences between the forms of traditional art and media art by organizing three different sections of related works,'' Park said.
Four curators, namely Maarten Bertheux from the Netherlands, Raul Zamudio from the United States, Tohru Matsumoto from Japan and Andreas Broeckmann from Germany, participated in organizing the different exhibitions.
Media City Seoul 2008 has three sub-themes, ``Light,'' ``Communication'' and ``Time.'' The Light section will demonstrate the different uses of light in electronic art, while the Communication section will deal with artworks that give various sensory experiences through hearing, smell and touch. The Time section features artworks with themes of changing images through the passage of time.
Park said this year's media biennale would also take a look back at the last four biennales.
``The 5th biennale is significant in retracing our prior exhibitions for preparation of the next decade. Therefore, it aims at asking fundamental and essential questions such as: What is media art? What is the difference between traditional art and media art? What changes in art have been caused from this and what kind of effects will this bring? It will also attempt to find out the answers of these questions through the exhibition of various media artworks,'' he said.
The Media City Seoul Archive will be open to the public at the archive room of the Seoul Museum of Art during the biennale. Also there will be an international symposium ``Turn of Medium Widens Aesthetic Experience'' on Sept. 11 at the lecture hall of the Seoul Museum of History.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government is sponsoring the Media City Seoul 2008. Visit www.mediacityseoul.co.kr.