From afar, the Busan Museum of Art (MoCA Busan) looks like a box wrapped in green silk. This silky outer layer displays miniscule waves as the wind blows. On a closer look, you can see that different species of plants are growing alongside each other all over the walls of the museum. This is the Vertical Garden made by botanist and artist Patrick Blanc. The Vertical Garden is home to over 175 different species of plants growing on installations across a vertical concrete wall, which transforms a mere wall into a garden. The countless photographs that visitors take with the wall as their glimmering background illustrates the popularity of the Vertical Garden. The Vertical Garden is a solution that was already popular and resolved one of the many controversies that the museum had suffered before it even opened: its exterior. Compared to many international precedents that consider museum buildings as a work of art in themselves, MoCA Busan displayed no particular features that separated it from the image of any other commercial facility. Critics even referred to it as a large-scale mart. There were no traces of critical contemplation of the identity nor of the necessity of MoCA Busan to the local community, nor even of any particular architectural language. There was even critical discussion directed towards cultural art administration regarding the absence of a design
competition for the museum’s final construction. The responsibility for the unresolved problems, that should have been made during the design phase, was passed on to the museum. Considering the fact that Eulsukdo, where the museum is located, is home to several natural monuments, including sites for migratory birds and a swamp, MoCA Busan decided to install the Vertical Garden. MoCA Busan sought to form a garden with various flora. This solution seemed to have been successful in addressing the existing concerns. The Vertical Garden, the largest of its kind in Korea, has become the star of MoCA Busan, attracting many visitors and thereby mitigating concerns over attracting guests because of poor accessibility. The Vertical Garden is planned for permanent installation at MoCA Busan. The planted flora will grow and enrich the garden in the future. However, many issues and problems of the Museum, which stood behind the Vertical Garden, remained unresolved.
The artist Jeon Joonho’s Mirror that Blossom in a Flower Garden presents objects and space that freely moves without the intervention of people.
Jung Hyeryun, Landscape of ‘-1’ visualised the Nakdonggang, flowing where the museum is located with LEDs on the ceiling.
Along with Patrick Blanc’s Vertical Garden, MoCA Busan has the ongoing exhibition ‘Artist Project I, II, III’ and ‘People Walking the Future’. These exhibitions introduce a selection of works that show MoCA Busan’s intention to present new media and sensory design like new media art, contemporary materials and experiments as a contemporary art museum.
In the ‘Artist Project I, II, III’ exhibition, artist Jung Hyeryun’s Landscape of ‘-1’ visualised the Nakdonggang, flowing where the museum is located with LEDs on the ceiling. Beneath this work there is a colosseum-type, non-transparent wall that soars up towards the ceiling. A frosted glass wall is full of scribbles. Most of the scribbles are transparent, allowing the light inside the installation to be visible. The incessant flow of LED lights across the Landscape of ‘-1’ and this installation resemble the dangsan Ritual’s tree, producing an exhibition space that has become a space of fantasy. The colourful lights display mankind’s desire to imitate nature. It is a piece that incorporates Busan’s environment, culture, and locality.
The artist Kang Airan created a pseudo bookshelf (Luminous Library) that has lights illuminating the structure from within. The luminous fake books are stacked in between real books, representing the convergence of analogue knowledge and future knowledge, information, and art. This pseudo library plays a symbolic role in bridging the past and the future while standing next to the children’s art library.
The artist Jeon Joonho’s Mirror that Blossom in a Flower Garden presents objects and space that freely moves without the intervention of people. The self-opening and closing curtain installed on
the centre screen, a glass door that repeatedly opens and closes, and the ceiling’s lighting track installed at knee height all represent objects that have lost functionality but have gained independence. These seemingly malfunctioning objects make visitors think about the nature of ‘errors’. The artist’s creativity intervenes and adds vitality to the objects at the moment when the innate functions of the objects stop working. On screen, strange life forms are projected, moving around on an abandoned boat at Yeongdo. Moreover, the artist installed the transparent red wall at the entrance shutter of museum and made it automatically open at intervals. When it opens, the outside light enters through the red wall. As the space is dyed red, a completely different atmosphere is created in this space. So by watching these malfunctioning objects, visitors gain a new perception of space and a unique experience that only a contemporary art museum that deals with new media and sense can offer.
Grass has been planted in the cracked floor in front of the shutter, showing a starting point of artistic creativity that attempts to sublimate construction flaws.
Tobias Rehberger’s ‘Tobias REHBERGER: Yourself is sometimes a place to call your own’ and Zimoun’s ‘Sound-minimalism: The hum of natural phenomena’ that has an extra box installed to maximize sound which can all be interpreted in the same context.
Tobias Rehberger’s ‘Tobias REHBERGER: Yourself is sometimes a place to call your own’ shows a starting point of artistic creativity that attempts to sublimate construction flaws.
Imagining the Future
The ‘People Walking the Future’ exhibition deals with MoCA Busan’s view of the future. The future, which is a notional concept, refers to new time and space based on the past engraved in our
memories and the present reality in which we stand.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Vapour illustrates a village covered with foggy smoke. The conflict between military dictatorship and the people is expressed in ambiguous movements and images covered in smoke. A video that mingles events of the past, present and future regardless of chronology makes people guess at which scene depicts the future. Vapour leaves it up to the viewer to define the future. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex – For the Courageous, the Curious, and the Cowards shows a diver pulling a pedicab underwater without wearing an oxygen tank. It metaphorically expresses the act of arduous labour for survival with the diver who painfully holds his breathe while pulling a pedicab. The final part of the video shows white cloths covering several places of the floor where all the divers have left, resembling an act of commemoration of those who have left and turned into ash and dust now. It is an act that reproduces the past in the present.
Chen Chieh-jen’s Realm of Reverberations, which resists and archives the dismantlement of Losheng Sanatorium, where Hansen’s disease patients were forcibly hospitalized to erase a dark part of their past; the Entry of People into Valhalla which combines events of democratization movements including the Gwangju Democratization Movement and Valhalla where only heroes are allowed entry;
Mioon’s Barricade Monument (Love Parade), which tells the story of a formation of a new community combining barricades, a boundary that ties social community, and the march of a marching band; all display the errors and conflicts of the past and means of envisioning a new future by rethinking the meaning of hope.
What kind of future does MoCA Busan envisage for art museums? Many people visited the museum upon MoCA Busan’s opening. The Vertical Garden that solved the museum’s exterior problem is receiving predominantly positive feedback. The newly opened MoCA Busan will see many more firsts. MoCA Busan will host the Busan Biennale this fall and it will witness countless artists and exhibitions come and go. MoCA Busan is left with the challenge of making the leap forward to becoming an influential art museum that connects art worlds of other genres, regions, and countries instead of settling as a local art museum.
Installation view, the works of Kang Taehun from ‘People Walking the Future’
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