Kiwis Catch Korean Art Wave

BTS. Squid Game. Parasite. Korean culture keeps going global. When Frieze launched in Seoul in 2022, the Korean government and local art institutions spotted a rare opportunity and rallied to support the British art fair. Seoul Art Week has only grown since.

I visited the South Korean capital last month at the invitation of the Ministry of Culture, Sport and Tourism (MCST), which allowed me to cover Frieze Seoul and domestic fair Kiaf in my capacity as news editor for contemporary art platform Ocula. Sales were sluggish but enthusiasm from global galleries and collectors attending the fair’s third edition was unabated.

Part of the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition/ image supplied

My trip to Korea also allowed me to connect with two New Zealanders who have helped draw the art world’s attention to the region in recent weeks.

While we didn’t have a pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year—Creative New Zealand told me the way the event had been managed was ‘unsustainable’—we do have a pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale, a couple of hours south of Seoul by fast train.

The New Zealand Pavilion is showing work by Shannon Te Ao, who won our top honour for contemporary art, the Walters prize, back in 2016.

I met him at the pavilion, hosted at Suha Gallery, where his exhibition Ia rā, ia rā (rere runga, rere raro) is on display through December 1.

He had just returned from an iced coffee run—it was already 30C at 10am—and was wearing a Coastal Signs cap, repping the Auckland gallery he and seven other artists run as a co-op.

Around us, projections on three walls showed sequences of black and white photos of performers’ faces and arms, blurred by motion. Behind the performers are images of the New Zealand landscape taken on the road to the lands where Te Ao’s whanau are buried.

The visuals are accompanied by a beautiful te reo māori song written and performed by Kurt Komene sung from the perspective of tīwakawaka, the fantail—hence the exhibition’s title, which translates as ‘every day (I fly high, I fly low)’. 

Te Ao’s work is a meditation on death and acceptance. The serenity of the space is evocative of tiwakawaka’s equanimity in the face of death—in Maori mythology, the bird laughed, blowing Maui’s cover when he tried to murder Hine-nui-te-po, death herself.

Te Ao chose to show the work without subtitles in English or Korean, trusting that those who wanted to learn more about the work would access written materials or strike up a dialogue. He said, Gwangju is ‘a city with a heavy history shared across the consciousness of many of the locals that I met. Our presentation, in many ways, entails a kind of meditation on the ongoing effect of events past. This confluence did indeed capture the imagination of many of the people, both local and international, that experienced the pavilion.’

Shannon Te Ao at the opening of the "Rere Runga, Rere Raro" installation

The work was originally commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art and created in 2021. This iteration was curated by Karl Chitham, Director of the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, and presented by the Dowse, Te Tuhi, and the Office for Contemporary Art Aotearoa (OCAA).

Showing an established work that costs no more to ship than a zip file is a strategic choice at a moment when arts funding in New Zealand is lagging behind the opportunity.

New Zealand wouldn’t have a pavilion in Gwangju if not for Stephanie Post, who wrangled an invite from the Biennale Foundation through her networks on a visit to Seoul last year. Post, who later established the OCAA, brought the opportunity to Creative New Zealand, but they declined to provide funding.

OCAA, Te Tuhi, the Dowse, and patrons Jo and John Gow and Jenny and Andrew Smith covered different costs. The Gwangju Biennale Foundation stepped in with projectors, invigilators and coordinators, and our Ambassador, Dawn Bennett, hosted the opening.

‘This is a project that I think needs to continue, and we have already started talking with the Gwangju Biennale Foundation about 2026,’ Post said.

‘We would love to be able to commission and present a new work in 2026,’ she said. ‘It would be amazing if this could be funded through a public-patron partnership, much like the New Zealand presentation at the Venice Biennale, but at perhaps a tenth of the cost. This would allow the artist to select the space they show in, have time to make something and spend time installing and being there. It would also give us a little bit of budget to market the presentation, so more people knew about it in advance.’

Without support from Creative New Zealand, there’s a real risk that New Zealand will lose the opportunity to have a pavilion at the next Gwangju Biennale, just as we missed out at the Venice Biennale this year. (Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that our artists deserve one, Mataaho Collective won the Golden Lion for best presentation in the event’s International Exhibition.)

Part of the Busan Biennale 2024 / image supplied

In nearby Busan, rising kiwi curator Vera Mey and Belgium’s Philippe Pirotte launched another major art biennial over the northern hemisphere summer. The 2024 Busan Biennale, titled Seeing in the Dark, runs from 16 August to 20 October.

Mey and Pirotte’s exhibition considers how artists operate in the ‘darkness’ of surveillance capitalism. They look to both Buddhist notions of enlightenment as a means to end suffering, and anthropologist David Graeber’s 2019 book Pirate Enlightenment—on the liberal politics of 18th century pirates in Madagascar—for ways of living and thriving outside mainstream culture.

‘Working on a project of this scale was extremely challenging,’ Mey said. ‘It was also very satisfying making, quite literally, big things happen. It really tested my own knowledge of how to produce things to scale as well as how to intellectually connect many ideas and artworks from different parts of the world together.’

The exhibition features five artists from Aotearoa—Abigail Aroha Jensen, John Vea, Layne Waerea, Sorawit Songsataya and Sriwhana Spong—leveraging Mey’s position as an International Director at Te Tuhi, the curatorial equivalent of an editor at large. (Te Tuhi and the Busan Biennale co-commissioned three of the works, and Te Tuhi’s Programme Manager, Andrew Kennedy, oversaw the installation of works by some of the New Zealand artists.)

The Busan Biennale saw great visitation from both local audiences and the international art community, thanks in part to its scheduling alongside Frieze Seoul and the Gwangju Biennale. It provided New Zealand artists rare exposure in South Korea.

‘I think the New Zealand  cultural ‘brand’ is still a bit of an enigma for Korean audiences,’ Mey said. ‘However, there is a lot of curiosity and interest in engaging with artists from here, particularly those with indigenous perspectives.’

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon visited the Republic of Korea from 4 to 5 September, just as Seoul Art Week began. The two countries announced that they’re working towards a ‘Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’ that would see closer economic and defence collaboration. The Beehive’s statement made no mention of closer cultural ties, but imagine what kiwis could achieve—and the benefits to our creative economy, tourism industry, and soft power abroad—with greater support. 

’I think the conversation should continue regardless of economic or military strategy,’ Mey said. ‘I’m aware that there is a substantial Korean diaspora in New Zealand and it’s really not that far away geographically. I think we still have a long way to go in terms of understanding how Asia might configure as a cultural reference point and vice versa.’

• views expressed are those of the author

• Asia Media Centre