KOR
Flickering Shores, Sea Imaginaries, this year’s edition of the Sea Art Festival, is inviting us to rethink our relationship with the sea, referring to the beauty but at the same time, the fragility of our shores, and exploring alternative frameworks and visions for engaging with the ocean and marine environments.
The sea is deeply embedded in our lives and capitalist society, a vital source for our survival, but also a vast industry we exploit for food, medicines, energy, minerals, trading, travel and so on. But increased human activity, from extensive cruise tourism, shipping and overfishing to nuclear testing, pollution and deep-sea mining have been plaguing the sea, having a huge impact on marine ecosystems and habitats.
Instead of viewing the sea from the coast as a divided and abstract surface for moving around commodities, Flickering Shores, Sea Imaginaries reminds us that we are part of this body of water. This year's Sea Art Festival aims to explore new relationships with the sea and its ecologies, enabling spaces for cooperation, collective visions and synergies as a call to resistance and restoration.
Emma Critchley is an artist who uses water as a formal material property in a range of media, including film, photography, sound, installation, and dance. Her work explores the underwater environment as a political, philosophical, and environmental space, and has been shown extensively nationally and internationally in galleries and institutions, including the official Italian pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. Her current project, Soundings, explores how film, sound, and dance might be used to connect us with the deep ocean to help foster the meaningful connection needed to inspire care for the deep sea and its ecosystems.
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Based in Busan, Yun Pil Nam has participated in eight solo exhibitions and more than 50 group exhibitions at leading art institutions in Korea. By moving from the flat surface to three dimensions, Yun strives to express a world of art that goes beyond the superficial boundaries of painting, which can bind the past, present, and future together. Since 2016, she has been particularly interested in installation art and has also participated in creating theater costumes and public art projects.
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Ari Bayuaji was born in Indonesia in 1975 and immigrated to Canada in 2005. Dividing his time between Montreal and Bali, the artist is known mainly for his art installations, which incorporate found and ready-made objects from different parts of the world, thereby exposing himself to the different mechanisms of cultures. In almost all his artworks, Bayuaji has consistently used found/old objects from around the world as the material and subject matter. He is an expert in conveying aspects of daily life, as his works usually try to show the overlooked artistic value in everyday life through objects and places, and their roles within society.
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Lab C works with the keywords “plant,” “region,” and “art.” Lab C, a collaborative duo made up of Mira Park (Forest Curator) and Changpa (Art Director), studies the experience they had in one particular place in the past after carefully observing one single part of Busan’s mountains and surrounding sea over a long period of time. They have presented curatorial programs such as Time to Ramble, Time to Ramble: The Sea, and Cosmos in One Square Meter by curating viewers’ experiences.
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Cho Eun-Phil uses blue as her main sculptural element to transform everyday materials into extraordinary and surreal spaces. With Cho, her blue is not just a color of physical materials; for her, each and every material is changed to blue and transformed into an illusionary space and a space of meaning. Her installations are a fundamental experiment about site-specificity and a challenge to it. These spaces allow not only the viewer but also the artist herself to experience unfamiliar moments. Recently, Cho has been working on a residency at Clayarch Gimhae Museum, with a particular interest in plant forms that change over time. She will be exhibiting at the Hangang Sculpture Project this year and at the Ichihara Lakeside Museum in Japan next year.
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The sea has many faces. Sometimes, it comes to us with a calm smile, sometimes with a storm as if it were angry. Today, people have led an affluent life with the diversity that the sea gives humans. At the same time, people wonder whether they can pass on the earth's ocean to future generations in its entirety.
This installation expresses the symbiotic relationship between people, marine environments and the sea, which is still a base of infinite life that can be restored. In the ocean, the deep sea has a deep interior. Attention moves quietly and slowly, not being swayed by the changes and waves of the busy world. Deep Sea Meditation the feeling of walking along the path of the deep sea, a realm where you can enjoy quiet and deep contemplation away from the hustle and bustle of urban modern life. It also intends a time to look back on the relationship with the sea in the past, and consider a future where our connection with the deep sea hopefully wouldn't be one of exploitation.
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Finally, I breathe deeply facing Ilgwang Beach. This is a moment when you encounter a space that invites you to relax and let go, forgetting about tension and time.
Mongjoo Son’s Ilgwang Swing is such a space; a swing pavilion made of objects found in Busan and Ilgwang that invites visitors to interact with it and feel liberated. The artist, having collected objects that usually float on the sea, has stacked them together to create the swing pavilion structure, which is made to look like it’s breathing, inhaling, and exhaling. She portrays the constant movement of the buoy as the movement of a swing. And she invites visitors to move along with this breathing, inhaling and exhaling as they use the swing.
Mongjoo Son creates this swing for adults in particular (although children are also welcome to use it), as adulthood often means the end of play that brings joy, stimulates our imagination, and helps us adapt and solve problems. Play can also connect us to others, and Mongjoo Son’s swing here enables us to take our feet off the ground and reality for a while to feel like floating, and move along with the sea.
Mongjoo Son’s large-scale and dramatic structures offer a reimagining of fluidity while enabling us to imagine new stories around a place. Ilgwang Swing becomes such a space inviting us to connect with and reimagine stories about the sea.
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Echo, Filled in the Sea is an installation in the shape of a net that spans 8 meters in width and 4 meters height. The net is created based on stories of local residents. It is intricately woven with pearls and beads. The round and luminous pearls symbolize precious moments, emotions, and memories. Additionally, the arrangement of pearls, along with elongated beads, form Morse code messages, encoded text characters in sequences of signal durations. Each pulse of the Morse code represents a message written for someone close, who can no longer be here — a message for someone from the past and long gone.
The net is suspended above the beach, swaying freely at the boundary between the sea and the sky. It reaches out toward the distant sea, a symbol of longing, as delicate strands of the net are intertwined like outstretched hands.
The hidden voices within the encrypted messages in the delicate threads of the net yearn to reach the souls of those who are no longer by our side, while reminding us that the sea is a place of hardship and precariousness for many people. As we gaze upon the transparent glow of pearls and beads, we offer a prayer that they might echo back to us.
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With philosophy at its core, Shailesh’s work contemplates the world at large by examining existing knowledge, systems, traditions, rituals, metaphysics, and philosophy itself through methods of science, technology, and artistic intervention. With a diverse visual vocabulary, he attempts to interweave philosophical connections between disparate observations, thoughts, moods, feelings – the internal world – and objects, machines, landscapes, phenomenons – the outer world.
As part of his learning in a Gurukul (Traditional Indian knowledge system or school), he was exposed to mythological scriptures and Tarka Shastra - a process to analyze the source of knowledge and its verification through the art of debate. The play between the external beauty or functionality of a form/object, its inner meaning, extended connotations, and the consequential critical analysis of the object is what is embodied in the Tarka Shastra which also informs his artistic practice. He thereby combines this knowledge with scientific methods and machinery of the modern world that concerns contemporary human needs, roles, and responsibilities.
Samudra Manthan addresses the same by navigating, visualizing, and creating a kinetic sculpture of a rotating mountain that constantly churns the seawater contained in a tank. By taking reference from an Indian mythological story of the same name, the work mentions a churning process through which the world and all the living beings emerged, but also emerged nectar and poison. The story begins with the Devas (deities) forming an alliance with the Asuras (demons) to jointly churn the ocean for the nectar of immortality to be shared, assuring diplomacy and equality. The churning of the ocean was an elaborate process for which Mount Mandara (Name of a mountain) was used as a churning rod, and Vasuki the King of Serpents became the churning rope. As the process is gone through and the nectar is successfully obtained, it is deceptively consumed by the devas / deities whereas the poison is left for the demons.
This mythological tale of aspirations is visualized in the context of today’s world in the kinetic project, Samudra Manthan: Churning of the Ocean. Although the nectar is desired by all, the poison shall inevitably be consumed too. The yearning to achieve immortality in the story is also symbolic and metaphorically profound in relation to contemporary issues.
The vastness of the ocean and its unlimited potential has been a reservoir of resources for humankind since ages. In current times, it is considered one of the most valuable natural resources that provide us with; food, fuel, energy, medicine, minerals, gems, and other materials. This extraction process often includes drilling the seabed in order to extract the crude oil, reverberating the core of the mythological story. Here in the project, the nectar and poison are metaphorically perceived as consequences of our constant efforts in the consumption industry. Samudra Manthan: Churning of the Ocean is an attempt to examine the polarizing impacts of extraction of resources by contemplating the construction, deconstruction, and consumption of resources and thoughts in current times. In this process, Shailesh uses technology to reflect upon his thoughts and give them a new meaning that eventually unfolds the socio-political hierarchy.
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What does a boat represent?
The night is a time when objects that are clearly visible during the day become shrouded in the shell of darkness, connecting through personal imagination. It offers an experience of the unfamiliar, guiding us through vague boundaries with strange and fantastical feelings. Based on these thoughts, Between Light and Darkness intends to explore things that can be sensibly defined in a conventional manner, yet viewed from a different dimension, it aims to reveal them as ambiguous, peculiar or uncanny.
The blue lace used by the artist to cover these boats forms the outer layer of this work, and blue is a color with a heavy presence in this environment between the sea and the sky. But blue also carries the significance of darkness. Darkness, where light is lost, momentarily sets aside the clear existence of familiar objects we know and focuses on landscapes and objects in the dark, opening up a new sense and way of seeing them.
A boat at sea is a common and familiar sight, and an object with a distinct and unique name. In a place like Ilgwang, a boat is a ubiquitous object that we rarely pay attention to. Ilgwang (sunshine in Korean), where this artwork is located, is said to be the place that receives the sunlight first. By enveloping the boat in blue lace during this brief overlap of light and darkness, the boat in the dark temporarily sets aside its clear existence and meaning, becoming a subject that invites us to imagine alternative meanings. While the lace surrounds the entire form of the boat, it simultaneously reveals parts of it hidden beneath the patterned fabric. Like skin, the lace covers the object, making it opaque but also accentuating the subtleties of it hidden underneath.
Seen yet unseen, an everyday object becomes open to new interpretations and stories. Is this the representation of a journey or a passage? A journey at its beginning or the end?
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