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Cyber City: despite budget woes, Media City Seoul 2002 effectively showcased the promise—and limitations—of high-tech art work from around the globe - Report From Seoul
Art in America, Feb, 2003 by Richard Vine
As the Whitney Museum's "BitStreams" exhibition recently reminded New York viewers [see A.i.A., Sept. `01], new-media shows tend to be based on two fallacies: one, that today's advanced technology provides a perceptual experience unprecedented in human history; two, that the virtual has now effectively displaced the real. Can anyone miss the stark discrepancy between the jazzed-up theory applied to high-tech works in articles and catalogues (where even the weakest idea can get the help of steroidlike terms such as "hyper-," " cyber-," "hybrid" and "digital") and the often quite rudimentary visual effects on dispay in the galleries? Clearly, the only sensible thing for a critic to do is put aside the tomes and go have a hard-nosed look. This is no small matter when the action is taking place halfway around the world.
On this count, Media City Seoul 2002 acquitted itself surprisingly well--given that it was the victim of a budget cut of staggering proportions. Two and a half years ago, government sources supplied organizers some $9 million in the hope that the first biennial would attract huge audiences, foreign and domestic, and help establish Korea as an information technology mecca (hence the "Media City" epithet). The result was a massive show featuring some 100 international artists, 70 percent from abroad, many of them full-fledged stars like Vito Acconci, Matthew Barney, Stan Douglas, Tony Oursler, Pipilotti Rist and Bill Viola [see A.i.A., Feb. `01]. The impact, however, was apparently not all that local authorities wished. For the 2002 version, titled "Luna's Flow" (thus linking moonlight and video-monitor glow, the 18th-century sublime and its virtual-era update), funding was slashed to just under $500,000. The number of participating artists fell to 80, 45 percent of them Korean. In marketing terms, French theorist Jean Baudrillard, who delivered the keynote symposium address, supplied the sexiest name on the entire event roster.
Nevertheless, artistic director Wonil Rhee managed to put together an exhibition that, though confined exclusively to the Seoul Museum of Art, encompassed artists from 23 countries and gave a fair impression of the variety of new-media work currently being produced. The selections were made by a global team that included independent curators Marie de Brugerolle (formerly of France's Le Magasin and Centre Pompidou), Michael Cohen (U.S.), Huang Du (China) and Azumaya Takashi (Japan), as well as Gregor Jansen (ZKM curator, Germany), Kim Machan (director of Multimedia Art Asia-Pacific, Australia) and Gunalan Nadarajan (visual arts dean, Lasalle-Sia College of the Arts, Singapore). Examples ranged from Michael Kunze's surrealistic oil-on-canvas landscape with figures, 8th Noon (2001), produced without technological intervention but avowedly influenced by virtual-reality space deformations, to Haluk Akakce's ultra-slick digital animation projection Blood Pressure (2001) to John Tonkin's Elastic Masculinities (1998), an interactive Web piece that permits visitors to instantly adjust the relative sizes of body parts on a male figure--or opt for "random select," producing God-knows-what mutations at the press of a button. Indeed, the entire show--overburdened, like most international surveys these days, with fancy and rather baffling thematic subdivisions ("Digital Sublime," "Luna Nova," "Cyber Mind," "Luna's Children")--was in fact best comprehended through its four major medium categories: painting, graphics and photography; video; object installations; and computer and Web art.
Perhaps because they tap into such a long tradition, static 2-D images most clearly reveal the formal secret behind much new-media work: it employs one new technological maneuver (the unsympathetic would say "gimmick") to give a novel twist to some well-established genre. Eva Stenram offers color photographs (2001) of royal palaces in seven European Union countries, the windows and doors digitally erased to suggest their occupants' political isolation. In the impressively scaled paintings of Cody Choi's "Twin Funeral" series (2002)--said to commemorate the double death of reality, first through conventional and now through digital imagery--video scenes pixelated into richly colored abstract fields are mesh-transferred to canvas, where small, blocky human figures interact like video game characters. The abutted mirror images in Kang Hong-Goo's black-and-white photo series "Beach" (2002) induce a momentary disorientation, a state consonant with the horizontal diptychs' take on socially regimented leisure activity. Moon Hyung-Min, questioning the effect of sign-system overload on contemporary consciousness, eliminates brand names and ad verbiage from his color shots of city streets and Damien Hirst-like pharmacy shelves (2002). And one of the show's most haunting pictures, Yoona 1 (1999) by Catherine Ikam (with Louis Fleri), presents the close-up portrait of an Asian woman, in sidelit semi-profile, with her eyeballs digitally altered into a viscous goo.
