Connecting City to Sea: Highlights from Sea Art Festival 2017
By Julee WJ Chung
View of 2017 Sea Art Festival on Dadaepo Beach, Busan. The crab-like installation in the front is created by D-ART, a group of visual arts students from Dong-A University. Titled Anywhere (all works 2017), the work is assembled with various doors from collected from different places. The artists aimed to create a lively and inviting sculpture that can be entered from any side.
For its 30th iteration, SAF continues its tradition of connecting its audience to their surroundings through newly commissioned, site-specific artworks. Headed by the artistic director Do Tae-Keun—an artist and professor at the College of Design and Arts at Silla University in Busan who has presented artwork at the 1989, 2011 and 2013 editions of SAF—the festival invited 19 Korean and 15 foreign artists and artist groups, plus seven special teams, from 11 countries to feature 41 works on Busan’s longest white-sand beach.
