Arts Council Korea has appointed Minsuk Cho as Commissioner and Curator of the Korean Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia. In response to the theme of the national pavilions, Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014, Minsuk Cho has proposed an exhibition entitled Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the Korean Peninsula was divided in two. Within the polarizing global and state systems of the Cold War, a society and culture that had maintained a unified state entity for more than a millennium evolved radically divergent yet irrevocably interconnected economic, political, and ideological systems. The trauma of war and adversarial politics have too often sensationalized and over-simplified this condition, reproducing clichés and prejudices that obscure the complexity and possibilities that lie in the Peninsula’s past, present, and future. In the Korean Pavilion, the architecture of North and South Korea is presented as an agent - a mechanism for generating alternative narratives that are capable of perceiving both the everyday and the monumental in new ways.
The Korean Pavilion is inspired by “Crow’s Eye View,” a poem by the Korean architect-turned-poet Yi Sang (1910 -1937). In contrast to the singular and universalizing perspective bird’s eye view, the crow’s eye view points to the impossibility of a cohesive grasp of not only the architecture of a divided Korea but the idea of architecture itself. Like uncharted patches of an irregular globe, a diverse range of work produced by architects, urbanists, poets and writers, artists, photographers and film-makers, curators and collectors forms a multiple set of research programmes, entry nodes, and points of view. They call attention to the urban and architectural phenomena of the planned
and the informal, individual and collective, the heroic and the everyday. Intertwined yet in opposition, spilling over to each other, they reveal the way that a wide range of architectural interventions have reflected and shaped the life of the Korean Peninsula. The Korean Pavilion reveals the Korean Peninsula as both symptom and agent, both archetype and anomaly of the tumultuous global trajectory of the
past 100 years. The exhibition is co-curated by the architectural historians and critics Hyungmin Pai and Changmo Ahn. The exhibitors include Ahn
Sekwon, Alessandro Belgiojoso, Nick Bonner (featuring the Mansudae Art Studio and anonymous artists and architects of North Korea), Marc Brossa, Che Onejoon, Charlie Crane, Maxime Delvaux, Jun Min Cho, Ik-Joong Kang, Karolis Kazlauskas and PLT Planning & Architecture Ltd., Dongsei Kim, Kim Hanyong, Kim Kichan, Seok Chul Kim & Franco Mancuso, Kim Swoo Geun, Young June Lee, Chris Marker, Philipp Meuser, Moon Hoon, MOTOElastico, Osamu Murai, Peter Noever (featuring the North Korean architects exhibited in Flowers for Kim Il Sung, MAK, 2010), Kyong Park (featuring Nam June Paik and the artists of Project DMZ, Storefront for Art and Architecture, 1988), James Powderly, Kyungsub Shin, Hyun-Suk Seo (featuring Kim Jong Hui et al.), Yehre Suh, Yi Sang and Dongwoo Yim.
This exhibition is supported by AMOREPACIFIC Corporation, Samsung Foundation of Culture, Janghak Engineering & Construction Co., Ltd., Duomo Co., Ltd., lokaldesign, Jaeho Son, Hye Jeung Jung, Young Min Woo, and sponsored by Samsung Electronics Italia S.P.A., Artemide, Samsung Chemical Europe GmbH-Staron, Lock Museum, Newlite Architectural Lighting Design & Imports, Turkish Airlines and Basic House.
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