September 26–27, 2014, 2–6pm
Artist House
Arts Council Korea
3F Symposium Hall 110-809
3 Dongsung-gil, Jongno-gu
Seoul
Korea
Organized by Arko Art Center
Curated by Hyunjin Kim, David Teh and Young Gyu Jang
Arko Art Center’s project “Tradition (Un)Realized” is focused on modes of multidisciplinary artistic research into various kinds of tradition, with a view to deepening the relationship between the traditional and the contemporary. Tradition is a kind of power created by modernity, a power “formed as the modern remembers the past.” (Lim Hyung Taek) This is especially true in Korea today, where the traditional is isolated from contemporary culture, its boundaries firmly fixed by national institutions, systems of technical apprenticeship and the reification of tangible and intangible cultural assets. The result of these structures is that our cultural traditions sometimes seem more foreign than imported, Western ones that have become part of everyday life. How can traditional art genres transcend this bind and be refreshed? How do they assert their relevance to the present, and to the future? Can they be radically contemporary?
The exhibition components of “Tradition (Un)Realized” have brought together art forms rooted in tradition, but which employ modern and contemporary modes of expression—including complex forms such as the performance-lecture, dance and the moving image—to examine the sustainability of traditions, their practical and discursive responses to contemporary realities and change, and their enduring significance to the art of today. This symposium adds a further, discursive dimension, shedding critical light on the problematics of tradition’s institutionalization, autonomy and authority in a range of contexts across Asia.
A common understanding of tradition today reflects Eric Hobsbawm’s idea that it is a product of modernization, particularly the establishment of nation-states. Benedict Anderson characterizes this product as an “imagined community,” geared towards overcoming economic, social and political differences and offering a unifying sense of belonging in a society. Tradition as a common denominator of the imagined, national community has been a crucial device of the state. In this symposium, however, we will pursue tradition beyond the horizons of national modernity, towards the more plural and global modernities being revealed by the contemporary. “Tradition (Un)Realized” insists on a more plural understanding of Asia’s traditions, some of which knit pre-modern ways of living and thinking into contemporary ones, while others have become marginal or exotic to the society that would claim them, under the general disenchantment of modernity. This project calls for a more equivocal approach to artistic traditions, one that neither over-emphasizes nor underestimates them.
The “Tradition (Un)Realized” symposium strives for a new, multidimensional view of tradition today, seen through the prism of cultural theory and critical discourse. It will open up contemporary approaches to tradition in search of practical and theoretical strategies for rethinking cultural inheritance and its potential critical amplitude in the present. With its complex narratives and ambivalent gestures, tradition may withhold as much as it reveals of the past; it may be a vehicle of provocation as much as of nostalgia; it may address an unknown future, as much as a known past. This epistemological enquiry by artists and art researchers sees tradition as a fulcrum of contemporary thought and practice, as a living and uncertain archive of our time.
Programme
Friday, September 26
Yun Young Do (professor at the East Asia Research Institute of Seonggonghoe University): “Nationalization Project and Traditional Culture Discourse in Taiwan and South Korea in the Cold War Era”
Jeon Jiyoung (traditional music critic): “Does Gugak Exist?: About the End of Invention”
siren eun young jung (visual artist): “Yeosung Gukgeuk: Tradition (Un)Realized”
Mo Eun Young (film programmer of Korea Film Archive Cinemateque): “Production of Crossroad of Youth: the ‘Narrator’ of Silent Movies and the Early Modern Experience of Viewing”
May Adadol Ingawanij (Director of Research at the International Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film, University of Westminster): “The Unruly Life of Tradition: Versioning, Cinematic Apparatus and Artistic Labour in Thailand”
Saturday, September 27
Jalal Toufic (thinker and mortal to death): “The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster”
Anselm Franke (Head of Visual Art and Film at the HKW, Berlin): “Modernity and Tradition: The Role of Fiction”
Shabbir Hussain Mustafa (Curator of the National Gallery Singapore): “The Pyramid of Souls—Fragmentary Notes on Mohammad Din Mohammad’s Treatment of the ‘Art Object’”
Park Chan-kyong (artist, filmmaker and Artistic Director of Mediacity Biennale 2014): “The Phantom of ‘National Art’”
David Teh (curator, writer and assistant professor, National University of Singapore): “La Fausse Monnaie: Tradition as False Currency”
Arko Art Center was established in 1979 as a public exhibition space under the direction of Arts Council Korea. It has worked to fulfill its function as an exhibition-supporting institution, specifically geared towards emerging experimental artists. Through this, Arko Art Center has consolidated its public, as well as educational, role to construct a valid platform for contemporary art and reinforced its professional role as a public art institution. In addition to gallery space, Arko Art Center runs INSA Art Space, an alternative space aimed specifically at promoting emerging artists, maintaining archives, offering seminar rooms, and providing project space. By doing so, Arko Art Center provides an arena in which diverse discourses form, and animated communication takes place.
Arko Art Center
110-809, 3 Dongsung-gil, Jongno-gu
Seoul
Korea
