Seoul: Until Now!


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	CURATORS' THOUGHTS	SEOUL: SOME MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS…
	Hundreds of blue and red neon church crosses lighting the cityscape, People huddling in the covered wagon in cold winter night, sharing drinks and companionship, Bad bitter-sweet coffee with egg yolk, served in dimly lit coffee shops Humid summer night, people in a public square dipping their feet in fountains, eating watermelon, drinking beer, and talking politics Rush hour: people shouting double! Dou-double! to taxi drivers in order to procure their services – truly a war of wits and will. In a city where the concept of permanence has disappeared, and where the generation gap is measured not in years but in months, everything is transitory; remaining as memory and impression in our mind that slowly fades away…
		MODERN SEOUL
	Modern Seoul is a product of extreme urbanisation process which saw the formation and rise of large high-population urban agglomeration areas in the 20th century. If you include the surrounding area, there are 25 urban areas in the world whose population is larger then 10 million. Each city has their own unique cultural background, with their unique blend of cosmopolitan population and multi-cultural environment. Even so, Seoul is almost unique in its size and influence on the country where it stands. If you look at the population, the city of Seoul currently ranks third in the world, and if one includes the surrounding urban area, fourth in the world. However, the figure which stands out, and makes Seoul unique, is the percentage of the country’s population living in and around the city. This figure is approximately 42% for Seoul – this means out of total population of 47 million, approximately 20 million lives in or around this city. This ratio is staggering. With the exception of city-states such as Hong Kong and Singapore (where the figure is 100%), it is the highest in the world. Such is the presence of Seoul in the mind of Koreans that the Korean slang word for capital is Seoul, and have officially adapted Shou'er (which literally means First Capital) as its official Chinese name (which many major Chinese organisations have refused to use). This importance of Seoul in most Korean’s mind is mostly due to its extreme geographic and political isolation prior to the end of Cold War. Seoul would have been the only major city in most Korean’s experience, looming large in the minds of Koreans. Just because Seoul was isolated does not mean that it was quiet. It was a pressure cooker of social and political movements, underground culture, fast growing economy, riots, limited but strong foreign influences (especially from USA and Japan). This boiling pot had begun to make an economic impact on the world since the 1970s, under the watchful eye of the government, but the influences on Koreans from abroad was getting stronger only after the democratization of Korea in 1988. One of the consequences of the democratization process was the freedom of travel granted to normal citizens, resulting in a large scale Diaspora of Korean populace around the world. Generation of immigrants, students, workers and tourists left Korea for promised lands such as USA and Europe, seemingly driven by desperate and urgent energy to go the land of their dreams. Some stayed outside, some went back to Seoul, both bringing what they learnt and experienced into Seoul in their own ways. From the early 90’s, Korea started to have a young, well educated and internationally oriented middle class elite. But due to this late development of ‘internationalisation’ in a city where the modernisation had started much earlier, but with many restrictions made by the conservative regime, the sense of both liberation and crisis is present on many levels of daily life. Traditional values and life patterns clash with new life styles and morals inspired from the West. Though in one sense Koreans had already from before an enormous Western cultural impact, being the only country in East Asia where Christianity since long is one of the main religions, dominating in particular the more privileged levels of society. But Christian beliefs combined with Confucian values do not necessarily mix well with late night clubbing, individualism and new mating patterns. Never before in history has the divide between generations been as big as it is now in Korea, and in particular in the big urban apple of Seoul.
		THE SEOUL ART SCENE
	The city of Seoul is fast, vast and confusing, and full of contradictory impressions. It is not exactly a beautiful city – in fact, many times quite to the contrary. It takes some time to uncover the qualities of Seoul. It is a maze with many detours and short cuts, where conformity is interrupted around every corner. The same could be said about the contemporary art scene in Seoul. Just like the city itself, its developments have been rapid. Mostly the contemporary art scene begun to evolve only after the process of democratization had started in the late 1980’s. The freedom of travel – granted to everybody in late ‘80s – allowed artists and artists-to-be, previously not allowed to leave Korea, to go where they wanted to, to see what they wanted, to learn what they wanted. It is almost as if desperation and urgency drove this generation of artists, to whom everything outside Korea seemed new and refined, looking for new stimuli and directions to push their work forward in this brave new world. This wide-eyed excitement and enthusiasm of course did not last long, being replaced by a more knowing, jaded view of the world. Even so, it gave a strong initial impetus for the push towards world-viewing global-centric art from inward looking Korea-centric art. From the early 90’s and on, Korean artists were already emerging on the international scene (though Nam June Paik had been there since the 70’s, working from New York and Europe) and are now slowly coming out of their isolation and are making their mark in the international art scene. Despite all economical turmoil in the later 90’s the art scene continued to develop. The previously conservative art departments at the many universities in Seoul have all by time adapted to new demands from the students, and “new media” has been almost a magic word in a country famous for its eagerness to adapt new technologies. Seoul has its own biennial designated only to new media art, Media City Seoul. The corporate accumulation of wealth has also brought an abundance of company owned museums and art spaces. Daewoo, Samsung, Ssamzie are all corporations with an initiative in contemporary art. The corporate sphere has been a much stronger actor on the art scene than the public, creating an art system very different from what is usual in the West. The success of the Gwangju Biennial in the mid 90’s brought a much stronger attention to Korean contemporary art from foreign curators and other art professional. Despite that both the Gwangju Biennial and its recent follower in Busan are remote from Seoul, it means that this new culture of art events brings in a flow of artists and curators also to Seoul. The exchange with the art world outside of Seoul has been in a constant flux in recent years, making the city the probably most dynamic art scene in East Asia today.