Current & Past Events
The Red Bridge, Art Practice, and the City: New Art Movements in Seoul and the Politics of "Collectivity"
This presentation explores a few contemporary art scenes in Seoul from the perspective of the urban and financial changes wrought by neoliberal restructuring, and argues that spaces of artistic expression, from the art world to urban ‘scenes,’ have interacted with these changes in a recursive manner. Since the 1997 financial crisis, South Korea has been forced to concentrate its economic resources into key export industries and to liberalize its financial markets. Two effects of this transformation that have affected the art world have been an increased investment in information technology industries and expansion of urban real-estate markets, as both have looked to art ‘communities’ to assist in the valourization of new technologies and the consumption of urban space, particularly through new media art and ‘new town’ development. However, the art practices targeted by these new investments have come under critique by a new generation of artists who, in contrast and sometimes critique of existing Korean art practices, have decided to make these very changes the subject of their art and use the opportunity provided by this new regime of urban change and art funding to critique both the neoliberal valourization of urban space and the fetishization of new technologies, identifying alternative uses of community, urban space, and collective practice that resist many of the intentions of the new art regimes. Art collectives such as the “Flying City” and the “microweiv” are explored in this context, as are some of the other artists and aesthetic conventions which inform their art practice.
- host:
- Jamie Doucette
- date & time:
- November 27th, 2007 at 7 pm
- location:
- IDS building, ECIAD,1399 Johnston Street, Vancouver
- contact:
- [info@colourschool.org]
Host Biographies
Originally from Ontario, Jamie Doucette is completing his doctoral dissertation in Human Geography at UBC. He examines the role of social movements in restructuring of the Korean ‘developmental state’ model, which has been the target of both neoliberal reform from above and democratic intervention from below. In this sense, he is curious how cultural movements interact with state policies in creative ways, especially when it comes to struggles over the meaning of urban space, of social collectivity, of work and exchange. To this end, he is critical of both the expansion of market relations to everyday life and art projects that all too easily embrace funding regimes uncritical of money and power. Jamie once dropped out of a new media art class when the instructor announced that it was his private desire to “touch the face of God.”
Event Images & Documentation
Image courtesy of Jamie Doucette