5th Anyang Public Art Project—APAP 5

The Anyang Public Art Project, Anyang Foundation for Culture and Arts, and Anyang City welcome you to the opening of APAP 5 on October 15–16 at Anyang Art Park and surrounding areas. Featuring tours of the new works, premiere screenings, a performance and parade by Eunji Cho and live music in the form of the Anyang Dongnae Festival organized by mixrice, the opening is free and open to all.

In Anyang Art Park, Byron Kim presents new works responding to the modernist architect Kim Chung Up and the pharmaceutical factory he built in 1959 on the historical site of Anyang-sa, the largest Buddhist temple constructed during the Goryeo Dynasty. For 21st Century Light of the Factory (2016), mixrice invited workers to reinterpret a classic performance from the Minjung era. Oscar Murillo worked closely with shaman Kim Ju Young to install his canvases in a grove of pine trees on Samseong Mountain. A copper lightning rod set in a nine-meter cobblestoned depression carved into the earth offers protection to the forest in Michael Joo’s Mediator (Anyang) (2016). In Álvaro Siza’s Anyang Pavilion, Choi Jeong Hwa offers a solution to function in the form of a wall of repurposed furniture to make space for informal seating designed by Christina Kim’s Rock Pillow Garden (2016), based on her childhood memories of Anyang Amusement Park and its unique landscape. The same space will host over 30 public workshops by HONF/House of Natural Fiber for Anyang Public Lab in November. Four bridges by Gabriel Sierra incorporate the natural elements of Korean philosophy—earth, metal, fire, and wood—while serving as a directional compass for hikers. Lisa Sigal’s intervention on the site of the former Manan-gak Pool serves as a civic monument to Anyang’s recent past. Rusted concrete cubes reference the accumulation and dispersal of capital in Damián Ortega’s One percent, one hundred percent (2016). Open Theater Me Meme’s Anyang Video Art Festival premieres at the Anyang Pavilion. And 20 Anyang Art Park shops host works by as many artists to fill the city with new possibilities of looking.

Throughout the city, Adrián Villar Rojas has installed 80 nests of the rufous hornero—the national bird of Argentina—importing this unique avian architecture into the natural and built landscape of Anyang. With anonymous newspaper inserts and bus stop posters, Sora Kim injects images of Anyang back into daily life, underscoring an obsolete and endangered reality. In Bona Park’s Paradise City, embedded among the digital advertisements that play on the subway platform at Anyang Station, students and tutors of music interpret the classic rock ballad of the same name. At Seoksu Market, art space Stone & Water has invited 30 artists to interrogate art and daily life with their Black Market festival throughout October. For her work Yiso (2016), Jinjoo Kim spent months under Anyangdaegyo Bridge with chess players who personify the unique character of post-war Korea. Supported by a newly-commissioned signboard in collaboration with painter Park Tae-gyu, Park Chan-kyong’s Anyang, Paradise City (2010) screens every Sunday at 4pm through mid-December at Anyang Art Center. At 3pm every Saturday, Lotte Cinema at Beomgye Station hosts Im Heung-soon’s new film, Ryeohaeng, which incorporates the stories of North Korean refugees living in this area.

In 2017, Danh Vo and the Isamu Noguchi Foundation will conjure a playscape for children in the heart of Anyang Art Park, while SUPERFLEX will conduct a series of workshops with local citizens to consider the accumulated assets of APAP and erect a new Welcome Center across from Anyang Pavilion. In Pyeongchon Central Park, Chosil Kil will renovate the X-games Park to promote health and (mis)fitness for local youth.

Since 2005, the Anyang Public Art Project (APAP) has sought to assert its unique cultural presence by commissioning art and architectural interventions throughout the city by renowned cultural practitioners including Sylvie Fleury, Gimhongsok, Jeppe Hein, Kim Yong-Ik, Lee Bul, LOT-EK, MVDRV, Manfred Pernice, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Haegue Yang, most of which are still on view today.

Watch the APAP 5 trailer here.
For more information, please visit apap.or.kr and apl.honf.org.
For press information, please contact press [​at​] apap.or.kr.