At Sea Art Festival, art rises from Busan's tides

Kim Sang-don's "Egg and Lighthouse" (2025), installed at Busan's Dadaepo Beach for this year's Sea Art Festival / Courtesy of Busan Biennale Organizing Committee

Since its inception in 1987, the Sea Art Festival in Busan has embraced the port city’s coastal topography, transforming its shores into a meeting ground between nature and contemporary art.

This year’s edition unfolds where the Nakdong River, the country’s longest, meets the sea. Its main stage, Dadaepo Beach, is a landscape shaped by the collision of currents. To artistic directors Kim Keum-hwa and Bernard Vienat, it is a site of ceaseless creation and erosion, a place where “new ecological and cultural narratives are continuously generated.”

Under the theme “Undercurrents: Waves Walking on the Water,” the biennale has gathered 46 site-specific works by 23 artists and collectives. These outdoor installations chart a journey through Busan, from a former incineration plant to a disused seaside cafe and to restored wetlands.

Seba Calfuqueo's "FOLIL" (2025) / Courtesy of Busan Biennale Organizing Committee

"Making Something out of Nothing" (2025) by Mathias Kessler and Ahmet Civelek / Courtesy of Busan Biennale Organizing Committee

In these unique spaces, pieces unfold that seem to breathe with the tide.

For “Sonic Drift,” Marco Barotti plunged into the waters off Busan's coast to capture the hidden acoustics of marine life. Blended with the region’s age-old fishing chant, “Huri Sori,” his environmental recordings project through six horn-shaped biodegradable speakers along the Morundae Observatory Deck Trail.

In another section of the shoreline, Mathias Kessler and Ahmet Civelek, working with local residents, wove discarded packaging and plastic waste into “Making Something out of Nothing,” a vivid 10-meter textile spun from the detritus of everyday life.

Busan-based collective OMIJA gathered mixed plants and seeds from the Nakdong River estuary to fashion a gigantic organic sphere, while Marie Griesmar’s metal and ceramic sculpture “The Green Between Waters” is submerged off Dadaepo Beach, revealing itself only to those willing to enter the sea.

Sea Art Festival 2025 runs through Nov. 2.

Viron Erol Vert's "Club Under The Fog" (2025) / Courtesy of Busan Biennale Organizing Committee