Art Seen at the 2004 Biennale in Gwangju

The first thing one encounters in the exhibition is “Briquette,” a work by Park Bul-dong. “From Pneumoconiosis to a Stroll in Forest” shows a pile of briquettes and trees here and there among the briquettes. This work is an expression of life, from the last scenes of a struggling life to one’s utopia.

Next in the exhibition is a piece titled “Torso-Lamb” by Marc Quinn (U.K.), a bronze work of plaster figures made of a piece of lamb meat and a rabbit frozen alive. This work criticizes DNA mutations.

“One or All,” a pillar made of bone powder, by Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu is also unique. It is a grey cylinder post set up obliquely and made of real human bone powder. It gives a sudden feeling that nullifies all conversations we have about life or death.

“The River of Time” by Tatsuo Miyajima (Japan) is also a very philosophical piece of plastic art. In the middle of a dark room, there are numerous number boards, as small as fingernails, with blinking digital numbers on them. The numbers on the boards are all different, and this can be interpreted as different lengths of individual lives, but it can also be interpreted to mean that the time we think of is also relative.

“Inside Track” by Moyomo Torimitsu (Japan) is also interesting. A hundred-something dolls in their suits are crawling around two reproduced cities reduced to two-pyong size. This work shows the psychology of human competition through its toy-like plastic art.

“Radium Clock Dial” and “Critical Mixture” by Jim Sanborn (U.S.) are works containing heavy social criticism of nuclear power and weapons. They reproduced a laboratory in Manhattan where real nuclear bombs were manufactured from 1943 till 1955. The work “9/11/2004” by Malam (Cameroon) reproduced the twin buildings, burned to ashes by the 9/11 terror, and the people inside the buildings burning was too realistic to look at.

Some works that describe our ordinary lives also caught our eye. “Process” by Å. Elzén (Sweden) shows white wedding dresses soaked in four glass tanks filled with salty water. The wedding dresses in the four glass tanks display different scenes as the salt crystals create different forms over time. This work tells that our ordinary life is somewhat boring, but as time passes, it becomes beautiful like the crystals.

“Moonlight Sonata Parade” by Lee Kyong-ho is one of the exhibition’s more popular works. It shows a scene that endlessly produces popped rice cakes. The artist says he plans to pop rice cakes--as many as the average number of daily visitors to the bienalle, which is 5,000. He is planning to make 5,650 popped rice cakes daily and sell them in envelopes made by a famous luxury brand “Prada” for 1,000 won. His work intends to shake our perception on prices by combining a cheap snack with one of the most luxurious brand names in the world.

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Mun-Myung Huh angelhuh@donga.com