After having been postponed for one year due to the pandemic, the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale launched in early September 2021 and will run for one more week at Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA). Directed by former M+ and Centre Pompidou curator Yung Ma, the Biennale brings together 58 works by 41 Korean and international artists and art collectives, with works spanning from moving image and installation to photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, music and performance. Collected under the title “One Escape at A Time”, the Biennale proposes a reimagining of escapism as a tool for navigating our fractured realities. Confronting some of today’s most pressing issues, the exhibition embraces escapism as a concept that connects us all in this troubled, complex world.
The title and theme of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale take ispiration from the popoular Netflix sitcom One Day at a Time (2017–20), about a three-generation Cuban American family living in Los Angeles. The series disguises its concern with urgent sociopolitical issues — including racism, gender, class, sexuality, identity, migration and gentrification, among others — with laughter and its conventional sitcom format. In the same guise, the Seoul Mediacity Biennale turns escapism into a diverse mixture of artistic viewpoints on current issues.
The notion or notions of escape have taken up an even greater significance following the restrictions and social divisions created by the pandemic and the lockdowns. Isolation has fuelled a myriad forms of ‘micro-escape’, as the curator calls them, with a redimensioning of what ‘togetherness’ means in this new reality.
Within the current atmosphere, the curator and his team say that “This staging of One Escape at a Time is a reminder that escapism can be a conduit for emotional and visceral connections—connections with each other, with our past and our present, and maybe even with the possibilities of a time to come.”
The connections that the Seoul Mediacity Biennale hopes to create have been facilitated through its public programme Echoes, which has included art space collaborations, performances, online projects, guided tours, artist talks, lectures, and workshops inside the exhibition, online and throughout the city. Echoes has extended the reach of the Biennale beyond the physical space of the museum to generate waves of visual and conceptual echoes across the city.
Part of this programme is Network, which runs until 1 December, and brings representations of works from the Biennale exhibition across Seoul.
Some 100 public and private locations across the city will display the artwork, including cafés, shops, bookstores, libraries, cultural institutions, outdoor media façades and TV broadcasts. In September, in collaboration with the television network TBS, the Biennale presented a selection of moving image works from the exhibition in an hour-long programme. In an effort to reach an even wider public, special versions of works by Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, C-U-T, Eisa Jocson, Yuri Pattison and Tastehouse× WORKS will be screened twice an hour every Wednesday and Saturday on K-Pop Square Media, the COEX Artium media façade in the centre of Gangnam.
The Seoul Mediacity Biennale certainly has gone to great lengths to share art with a wider public, not only targeting those specifically interested in art, but also those onlookers and passersby who might normally not stop by an exhibition. The Biennale’s website also had an online programme section and a monthly magazine titled Routes was distributed in cafés, restaurants and bookshops, featuring short interviews with artists, directors, as well as the owners of a restaurant and a bookshop.
The Biennale offers a myriad points of contact, a line connecting infinite dots across Seoul and a ‘digiverse’ (digital universe) of people around the world, impatient to catch a glimpse of somebody else’s escapist dreams and realities.
At the Seoul Museum of Art, the Seoul Mediacity Biennale takes up all three floors. Walking towards the museum’s entrance, we encounter a first, invisible work, inspired by Taoist philosophy and the concept of the Five Elements governing the interactions of all existence — wood, fire, earth, metal and water. Taiwanese artist Lim Giong’s Five Waves comprises five audio recordings, each corresponding to one of the elements. The tracks combine the sounds of each element with electronic notes, composing a meditative soundscape that evoques the Taoist concept of harmony. Walking through this installation, visitors might really feel in harmony and peace with their surroundings, suspended in a dream state that transports one outside of the current pandemic and the stressful reality it entails. The soundtrack is also available on the Biennale website for streaming and download.
The audio work is an apt choice to introduce one’s walk into the exhibition, a sort of pressure chamber through which one prepares — physically and psychologically — for a voyage into another dimension, reminding us that everything is somehow connected. At the entrance to the building, another work seems to complete the soundscape with a visual introduction to the experience that awaits visitors once they cross the threshold.
Also from Taiwan, Chang Yun-Han’s work hangs above the glass doors as a LED signage that displays phrases written in Chinese, English and Korean alternately scrolling across the screens. Entitled We Chose the Moon, the work uses phrases that seem pulled out of well-known fables or from someone’s private correspondence.
The suggestive words resonate with recent sociopolitical events in East Asia, as well as the individual experiences of people who are actively or unknowingly participating in processes that shape the growth, solidarity, future and history of their societies. There are also signages at Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, and Seendosi, one of the Network venues. An online version of this work is also on view in the online section of the Biennale.
Once inside the hall, we encounter Seoul collective YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES’s first episode of a flash animation series of seven videos scattered across different locations within the museum. SAMSUNG MEANS REBIRTH is a new work that, with the collective’s trademark humour, confronts the contradictions of global capitalism and the vices of corporate culture in Korea, among other issues.
The series sees a Samsung executive who died of overwork come back to life over and over again in each episode, first as a Samsung smartphone, then as a skin scrubber at a public bath frequented by Samsung employees. The music accompanying each episode covers Korean popular genres from different eras, ranging from the trot of the Japanese occupation, to the pop hits of the 1990s. The next episode can be found by using the QR code at each episode’s location.
Walking by the large-scale mural by Minerva Cuevas and the long, passionate onscreen kiss of Brice Dellsperger hanging above the hall, we enter the inner space of the exhibition, encountering Pakistani artist Bani Abidi’s politically charged photographic and video works that speak to the delusional hope for political change and the conflictual relationship between India and Pakistan at a deep, societal level.
There is alreay a sense of nostalgia pervading the space, an atmosphere that is heightened once Sarah Lai’s installation Gang Killer (2021) comes in full view. Set within a semi-enclosed structure, a sort of theatrical scenography, the installation is a cinematic escapist dream, and incorporates paintings, wallpaper prints, found images, readymade objects and decorative motifs to evoke the feeling of a nighttime piano bar from a bygone era. The setting looks as if out of John Woo’s classic Hong Kong film The Killer (1989) or Ryoichi Ikegami’s manga series Sanctuary (1990–95), which romanticise the killer as calculating, but soft at heart. With suffused lighting and its pinkish hues, Lai’s installation hints at the 1980s-90s Hong Kong gangster film imagery and creates the tension of an upcoming resolution à la John Woo.
With the intention of escaping the reality of control, Seoul-based Jinhwon Hong’s Good Afternoon, Good Evening, Good Night v2.0 comes as a reminder of how our views can be shaped by video sharing sites like YouTube. The artist has launched his own alternative visual subscription service, DESTROY THE CODES, of which he presents a real-time visual feed of the subscription content and a manifesto here on the first floor. On the third floor, he displays a connected photography project exploring the dynamics between visibility and invisibility in the media ecosystem.
Also engaging with notions of control is Kim Min’s photographic installation Yes We Cam, documenting protests on a wide range of social and political issues, and demonstrating how during such events the police use photography — with telescopic lenses or CCTV surveillance cameras — as a tool for state surveillance and political control.
Turning onto a poetic aspect of the grim life of migrant workers, Liu Chuang’s Love Story features pages from romance novels from the 1980s and 1990s the artist bought in bulk from a dilapidated book rental shop in the Chinese city of Dongguan, near Hong Kong. Dongguan is an industrial city home to many factories, where also many women migrant workers live. The pages display scribblings by various people, from drafts of letters and diary entries to contact information for pen pals, turning them into archives of the lives of migrant workers.
Just behind the wall is Kang Sang-woo’s 2021 video Forest Neighbor, which follows a brother and sister stumbling upon a film shoot in the forest by night, during a thunder and lightning storm. The setting turns into an almost surreal tale, where the artist highlights the invisible but intricate relationships that connect and inform the coexistences of disparate life-forms.
The feeling of surrealism is heightened in Li Liao’s two-channel performative video installation, while also capturing our undivided attention by picturing a cityscape we all have known in recent times. The work sees the artist roaming around his city — Wuhan — during lockdown in the early months of 2020. Li travels through deserted plazas, parks, boulevards and downtown areas while balancing a long wooden stick on the palm of one hand, on top of which is a red plastic bag. The artist acts as if completely aloof and unaware of what is happening around him, creating an absurditst, tragicomic view of life during a global crisis.
Switching off from Li Liao’s work, and reminded of the medical emergency created by the pandemic, we encounter Geumhyung Jeong’s installation that resembles the interior of a medical facility, with brightly lit white tables onto which are resting parts of (artificial) human skeletons fitted with electronic components. Under Construction imagines the human body in a perhaps not-so-distant future, where the human and the mechanised will intersect.
Going up to the second floor, the exhibition continues with Eisa Jocson‘s 2021 work Superwoman: Empire of Care. Jocson is one of the two winners of the SeMA-HANA Media Art Award, for her work reflecting on the plight of medical and essential workers during the pandemic in the Philippines, and presented as a K-pop inspired music video by her band The Filipino Superwoman Band.
In the opposite corner of the space is another video work that addresses reality with a fictional twist. Cici Wu’s Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon revisits the story of Yu Man Hon, a 15-year-old autistic boy who disappeared somewhere between Hong Kong and mainland China in 2000 and was never found.
In the work, the artist depicts the boy, who went missing when he reached Shenzhen, roaming the streets, mountains and other scenery to finally arrive in Hong Kong. The narration goes from Mandarin Chinese, to Cantonese and English, hinting at the city’s complex identity. The video work can also be watched on “Watch and Chill: Streaming Art to Your Homes”.
Towards the end of the second floor space is Hao Jingban’s video essay I Understand…, the other winner of the SeMA-HANA Media Art Award. The work relates the artist’s thoughts and experiences while staying in Berlin during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, at a time when Black Lives Matter protests were also spreading beyond the United States.
Using filmed and sourced footage, Hao explores the anti-East Asian sentiment at the onset of the pandemic, as well as the spread of collective indignation that goes beyond race identity in the BLM protests across the world.
As the curators explain, Hao “juxtaposes past struggles with current civic movements to examine whether difference and empathy can coexist in the complex world we live in today”.
Before going up to the third floor, Wang Haiyang’s video Apartment once again reminds us of the lives of those who are often overlooked in society, such as the migrant workers he potrays at a deserted construction site in Beijing.
The marginalised social status of these men is emphasised by the stark contrast between their dilapidated surroundings and the far away, sleek city high-rises in the background.
Suburban desert-scapes, construction sites and the lives of those who seem to count less than others in an ever evolving, fast developing economy seem to again be at the centre of Chikako Yamashiro’s work on the third floor. The Okinawan artist presents Chinbin Western: Representation of the Family, depicting the fictional lives of two families in Awa, a mining area in Nago on the island of Okinawa.
A massive land reclamation project is under way there for the expansion of a US military base in nearby Henoko, despite the opposition from local residents. Yamashiro’s characters are from a village near a mountain that has been desertified by soil mining for the Henoko land fill.
Hansol Ryu takes fiction onto the next level, with a ten-minute, low-budget B-movie-inspired horror story, Virgin Road (2021). Exploring and bending gender norms, the work sees a human hybrid creature conducting a wedding with itself, in a gore, splattery galore of innards and organs smashed under her heels.
The surrounding black-and-white graphic mural emphasises the pop, Tarantino-esque aesthetic, while the video presentation within a bridal changing room-like structure offers an intimate, if somewhat disquieting, cinematic experience.
We close our tour with Taiwanese artist Hsu Che-Yu’s video works that question and complicate the relations between the living, the dying and the dead. While The Unusual Death of a Mallard uses the artist’s own memories and family history to narrate the fate of a mallard duck as a lab animal, Rabbit 314 takes on a more morbid gaze, literally showing a dead rabbit being aimated by a puppeteer’s hands, imitating motions that we human expect the animal to make if alive.
Hsu highlights our complex coexistence with species other than our own, and seems to remind us that they are as important as us in this world we live in, exploit and need, now more than ever, to protect.
At a time when we have realised through social isolation that connectivity is of paramount importance, and one more step forward has been done with the conclusion of COP26, One Escape at A Time should serve us as a reminder that we are all connected, and we all need to work together to allow for our own small escapist dreams to come true.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
Enjoy a video tour of the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale
The 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale: One Escape at a Time runs from 8 September to 21 November 2021 at Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), Seoul, with programmes around the city and online.