Kwangju Biennale

The tear gas most popular amongst crowd control experts in Korea carries the faint odour of freshly ground black pepper. This acrid aftertaste of mob management loomed heavy over Kwangju last year. A city steeped in political resistance, Kwangju hosted the largest international art exhibition in Asia. 1995 also marked the 15th anniversary of the Kwangju Massacre, in which thousands of people were killed by troops of the US-backed military junta of Chun Du-hwan. Conceived as an event both to commemorate and masquerade the political and emotional memories of the massacre, the Biennale resembled nothing less than a giant theme park, replete with its own marching bands and dancing chicken mascot. Every day, the acres of fair ground occupied by the Biennale teemed with thousands of people from across Korea ­ grandparents brought their grandchildren, nursery school teachers brought their rambunctious charges, bourgeois industrialists brought their wives and miniature poodles. Covered continuously in the national media, the Biennale even managed to spark an agit-prop anti-Biennale, set up near the graves of the martyrs of the Massacre. For the few months it was up, the Biennale managed to attract the kind of culturally and economically diverse audiences that many Western institutions would covet.

While it was fun watching hordes of boisterous young school kids crawl over, play with and then break the art, for the most part this show was informed by a less interactive economy. In the last few years, several such cultural exhibitions have been mounted across the country. Part of the growing industry of culture in the developing world, they are a useful instrument for attracting tourism as well as multinational investment. That science-based industries use cheap, mostly female, Third World labour as a manufacturing base was reflected in the Biennale's emphasis on computer and technologically-oriented art. In particular, the 'InfoArt' sidebar directed by Nam June Paik and curator Cynthia Goodman raised many issues about how the Third World is entering the cultural arena of new global technology. Park Hyun-ki's video installation The Blue Dining Table (1995) served up the rubble-strewn aftermath of such economic development. Projecting images of industrial accidents and right-wing bombings on a plate sprinkled with stones, Park offered a critical way of understanding the representation of consumption.

For the most part, though, the installations in 'InfoArt' suffered from a disastrous inability to imagine beyond the tired binaries of 'what happens when art and technology meet?' A more resonant question that eluded the curators of 'InfoArt' was: who is going to profit from all this expensive equipment? Is the Third World entering the 'new era of technology' as active programmers of creative software or as a body of cheap data processors? Nothing underscored the limitations of the exhibition more than the depressing sight of young Korean schoolchildren being herded through the interactive installations at a breakneck speed. This was the gallery as assembly line in full effect. A programme of over 30 single-channel video programs that had been selected for 'InfoArt' were projected simultaneously, without sound, in a row of monitors facing Nam June Paik's Magnet TV (1965). In the midst of the consumerist rush, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mingnonneau's A-Volve (1993) provided a verdant reprieve. In a meditative chamber stocked with different varieties of plant life, audiences were challenged to touch different plants that would spawn various textures on a video projected image. The pace required to grow this image was almost subversive; you needed time to synthesise with the installation and understand the various forces at play. By integrating organic and creative life, A-Volve called into question the distinctiveness of categories like 'nature' and 'technology'.

By and large, though, what was missing from much of 'InfoArt' was that liberation of meaning. The curatorial bias of 'InfoArt' privileged a certain gimmickry and novelty over any real aesthetic and technological concerns. For a show that was intended to highlight the possibilities of computational art in the coming decades, 'InfoArt' made little space to vibe on how those same technologies have structured our realities and possibilities, reminding us that in the Third World plantations of multinational capitalism, dreaming is a luxury.

The 'International Exhibition of Contemporary Art' seemed to have a little more success in creating spaces both to dream and defy. But for a biennale curated under the bold credo 'Beyond the Borders', the exhibition seemed more intent on preserving boundaries, carving up the world as curatorial territory. In a new 'globalised' economy where capital is a stateless proposition, there has been both an intensification and erosion of nationalism. While many of the Korean artists in the Biennale were still mired in a naive but passionate ethic of nationalism, many more have gone beyond a flat, one-dimensional understanding of Minjung, or People's Art, that informed so much Korean art in the 80s. Many artists were struggling to imagine an oppositional art that transgresses the limitations of victimhood and glory. Woo Jae-gil created a tacky and wildly popular theatrical installation, Sound of the Day (1995), that used dramatic music and soundbites from the Kwangju massacre to represent the thrill of urban unrest. Woo's flashy showmanship only underscored the limitations of spectacle in communicating the complexity of political struggle.

Kim Myung-hye's Expression Against Suppression was lyrical and poignant where Woo's installation was loud, flat and clumsy. Kim's industrial metal monstrosity periodically dropped water on a burning plate of steel, sending thin streams of water into ascending clouds of vanishing steam. Building on an aesthetic legacy of industrial mechanisation, Kim suggested the diverse and often poetic forms of symbolic resistance that rise against capitalist modes of production. The hiss and hum of Expression Against Suppression (1994-5) complimented the fluttering movement of another Kim installation, Driving Up to the Limits (1994-5). Here, Kim had set a flapboard that spun changing GNP percentages behind a pole vault and a limbo bar, suggesting that in a capitalist model of development, it's not a question of how high you can jump, but of how far you can bend over.

Korean artist Ahn Sung Keum simply but powerfully dramatised the crippling effects of a dualism that renders ethics and aesthetics asunder. Ahn set an army of neatly halved, seated Buddhas in the fairground in front of the International Exhibition. Handicapped Human Being (1994-5) served as a reminder of the Buddhist philosophy of the co-arising of mind and matter, form and content, as well as self and other ­ and their racialised categories of black and white. In the peppery Kwangju autumn, Ahn's work left us dreaming of a world where there is never the absence of colour. The Biennale's Grand Prize winner was Cuban artist Kcho, who used Korean materials to construct his Para Olvidar/To Forget (1995). Balancing a rowing boat on a sea of upright empty beer bottles, Kcho conjured a fragile and dreamy dialectic between desire and its inevitable hangover, between the specificity of his materials and the universality of their assembled meaning. His boat, teetering at the intersection of dreams and diaspora, struck a particularly resonant chord in a country rocking in a similar space.