Busan Biennale: Divided We Stand
Museum of Contemporary Art Busan and Bank of Korea Building

History is a recurring nightmare. Renewed tensions between NATO allies and Russia and China have plunged the world into a second Cold War. It was fitting then that the 2018 Busan Biennale, hosted in the only corner of the Korean peninsula not captured by the communist forces during the Korean War (1950–53), examined the postwar legacy of divisions, from ill-fated partitions made in the process of decolonization to the enduring material and cultural borders cleaved between the first, second and third worlds. Organized by artistic director Cristina Ricupero and curator Jörg Heiser, with Gahee Park serving as guest curator for projects by younger artists from Asia, “Divided We Stand” featured 66 artists and collectives from 34 countries still affected by divisions and conflicts in the wake of the Second World War.

The Biennale’s strength and weakness was its clarity. From the outset at the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, there was a well-defined historical perspective. Chin Cheng-Te’s collection of historical documents and press clippings, titled American Pie (2016), relays Taiwan’s Cold War experience of military dictatorship and the deleterious influence of American military culture while Chantal Akerman’s film D’Est (From the East) (1993) portrays life in Poland and Russia just after the Soviet Union’s collapse through long, sobering takes. In a similar vein, Henrike Naumann’s immersive installation of cheap 1980s postmodern furniture was dotted with videos detailing the disaffected youth culture, following the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), which in turn gave rise to the economically disadvantaged region’s current budding neofascism. A forceful and dramatic memorial to the ghosts of history, Minouk Lim’s installation On Air (2017) resembles a television studio populated by ghoulish mannequins and taxidermy animals, with camera cranes made from tree branches and old car headlights. In an adjacent room, Lim’s new video and blacked-out wall of signs, It’s a Name I Gave Myself (2018), draws from the 1983 Korean television show Finding Dispersed Families, in which people wore signs around their necks with question marks standing in for the biographical information erased by the war.

Though the Biennale was thematically coherent and geographically comprehensive, covering the partitions of Ireland, Palestine and Punjab, as well as the division of Sudan, at times the thematic focus on the Cold War felt overelaborated. There were a handful of works that were eye-roll inducing in their overtness, such as Dora Longo Bahia’s two paintings in reds and oranges of abandoned-looking amusement parks scribbled with the names “Fukushima” and “Chernobyl,” or absurdly dramatic, like the sculpture of a gigantic, dead black crow by Laura Lima and Zé Carlos Garcia, both at the Biennale’s second venue, the former Bank of Korea building.

Elsewhere at the Bank of Korea, artists delved into the sinister, occult and weird—and possibly queer—facets of Cold War-era culture. Im Youngzoo’s essayistic video Guest Star (2018) looked at historical misunderstandings, from the message sent by the United States to the Soviet Union in 1963 to test a new joint emergency hotline that prompted the Kremlin to hire cryptographers to decipher its meaning, to a lip-reader trying to decode footage of leaders’ conversations at the recent North-South Korean summit in April 2018. Oscar Chan Yik Long’s maximalist wall paintings in ink and hanging banners of crazed-looking animals and skeletons grafted Chinese mythology into the Christian apocalypse narrative. Musician Minwhee Lee and artist Yun Choi’s collaborative six-part music-video series Viral Lingua (2018) delved into the recurrence of Cold War trauma in South Korean society through imagery such as a crying woman with eyes painted like sunsets singing about leaving her country behind. The curators concluded the Biennale on a dystopic note with Phil Collins’s room-sized installation Delete Beach (2016), comprising mounds of sand, oil drums, tires, bubbling pits of black liquid and a screen playing an anime about a schoolgirl who joins an anti-capitalist resistance group in a carbon-less future society. The collective indifference of the world’s superpowers to the planet’s impending ecological catastrophe suggests that, on this point, “united we fall.”