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Description
Gwangju, Korea and Singapore
It is not surprising that an artwork could suggest a metaphor for the global explosion of biennials. Korean-American Michael Joo's prize-winning work Bodhi Obfuscatus (Space-Baby) (2005) at the 2006 Gwangju Biennial in South Korea is a case in point. A gold-painted Buddhist statue sits in a darkened room surrounded by a latticed grid of webcams; surrounding this, mirrors and flatscreen TVs mounted on poles refract and reflect the images relayed by the tiny cameras. What the viewer sees is indistinct; fragmented views of the statue's face glow with the sickly green hue typical of real-time images transmitted on the Internet. If Joo makes the somewhat obvious point that the Web redefines our experience of time and place, he also encapsulates an idea about the biennial phenomenon: cultural translations are often murky, but the mechanisms of their transmission remain the lingua franca of globalism today.
This is true of modern communications technologies and the biennial format, use of the former sometimes being the best way to standardize an artwork in the international style.... |
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