Oct 03 2017

Connecting City to Sea: Highlights from Sea Art Festival 2017

by Julee WJ Chung

View of 2017 Sea Art Festival on Dadaepo Beach, Busan. The crab-like installation in the front is created by D-ART, a group of visual arts students from Dong-A University. Titled Anywhere (all works 2017), the work is assembled with various doors from collected from different places. The artists aimed to create a lively and inviting sculpture that can be entered from any side. All photos by Julee WJ Chung for ArtAsiaPacific.

For its 30th iteration, SAF continues its tradition of connecting its audience to their surroundings through newly commissioned, site-specific artworks. Headed by the artistic director Do Tae-Keun—an artist and professor at the College of Design and Arts at Silla University in Busan who has presented artwork at the 1989, 2011 and 2013 editions of SAF—the festival invited 19 Korean and 15 foreign artists and artist groups, plus seven special teams, from 11 countries to feature 41 works on Busan’s longest white-sand beach.

Inspired by Dutch cultural theorist Johan Huizinga’s Latin phrase “homo ludens,” which was coined under the idea that “art should be fun,” the environmentally friendly art festival takes on the playful theme of “Ars Ludens: Sea+Art+Fun,” aiming to highlight the playful attributes of contemporary art. Alongside the main exhibition, the organizers of SAF will host a variety of public programs, including academic symposiums overseen by art critic Chang Won, artist talks, docent-led tours, art markets and experimental seminars that will be live-streamed to bring the exhibition to a wider audience.

In an interview with ArtAsiaPacific, the installation artist and Museum of Goa founder Subodh Kerkar spoke of his passion for this project: “One of the most important things that happens here at the Sea Art Festival is that it democratizes art for the masses. I’m happy that we are able to create work next to the ocean—it is a highway of cultures that plays an important role in bringing civilization together.” The multilayered artworks stationed along Dadaepo Beach are creations that are fun and inviting, though they also require thoughtful consideration by visitors to unpack their relationship to Busan’s environs.

Artworks are not only stationed on the beach, but also in the neighboring Dadaepo Beach Park, whose paths meander through streams and greenery before leading visitors to the seaside.

German artist PAUL SCHWER’s Billboard Painting Busan is a giant placard that comes alive at night with its fluorescent lights. Installed at the entrance of Dadaepo Beach Park, his work uses blue, yellow and pink lights to signify happiness and reflect the colors of the sea.

In Rocks, Meet the Sea, Korean artist KANG IN GOO created a sculpture that mirrors the hues and grains of the beach.

Artist duo OHASHI HIROSHI & HA MYOUNG-GOO have worked together for the last few years to bring their audience closer to nature’s sublime qualities and life’s unknown. When taking a closer look at Sea Cube, an installation located at the center of the beach, visitors can look into a dark abyss—a vast hole dug by the artists that can be seen through a circular cutout on the roof of the iron structure.

Museum of Goa’s founder SUBODH KERKAR recreated the ocean’s waves using recycled plastic bottles in his installation Moses and the Plastic Ocean. The artist is also an environmental activist, and communicates the idea of “anti-littering” through his visually stunning works.

Coming up from the seaside, the restaurants of the city are an ensemble of lights against the darkening night sky.

British artist SHANE BRADFORD’s work Agalma Two Halves takes on a few connotations when placed upon the beach: a beach ball, a ferris wheel, a seaside ride. Deliberately using the colors of the Trivial Pursuit board game, where each color represents a different academic category, the work aims to represent “the whole font of knowledge in all subjects,” said the artist.

KWON JUNG HO’s Mirror of Time 4 serves as a memento mori.

Thai artist BOONKERD SRISUKHA’s colorful sculpture Buffalo Boy lights up at sunset. The artist depicts a dynamic figure of a water buffalo—an animal that has impacted the life of not only the artist, but also the lives of countless farmers in Thailand.

JIN WOO KIM’s sculpture The Secret of Evolution: #J-2 follows a playful narrative of a spaceship that has traveled to the past and back. The life-sized vessel stands erect on the shores of the beach, as if abandoned by its captain and crew.

Colorful Bomb by JEUNG TAKE-SUNG paints the sky with an abstract landscape of its own. The artist intended the sculpture to be seen from the other side, so that the colors appear to be “attacking” the monotonous cityscape of Busan.

HIROYUKI SHINOHARA’s Bamboo Mandala is created from multitudinous intersections of bamboo strips, symbolizing what the artist describes as “the traces of time.” He writes that the work is an attempt to depict a “temporal accumulation in the port city of Busan, where people and things constantly come and go.”

Julee WJ Chung is the assistant editor of ArtAsiaPacific.

The 2017 edition of Sea Art Festival, “Ars Ludens: Sea+Art+Fun,” is on view at Dadaepo Beach, Busan, until October 15, 2017.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.

Tools

| More

Sep 2015