2005 Daejeon FAST: Future of Art, Science and Technology

by Jiho Lee
Daejeon Museum of Art, Daejeon, Korea, 2005
142 pp., illus. col. Paper, np
ISBN: 89-92017-00-6.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@hogent.be

In the Fall of 2005, Daejeon Museum of Art staged an ambitious festival under the promising title ‘Future of Art, Science and Technology’ to emphasise its assumed position as Korea’s runner up science and technology city. The festival could easily have been another city marketing event, but it turned out — as far as one can deduce from browsing the catalogue — to offer an interesting mix of different presentations of what is happening in the crowded squares where these three disciplines meet.

The FAST exhibition was held at various locations across the city. At the central location (Daejeon Museum of Art) an international selection of world-renowned artists formed a kind of frame of reference for what was shown elsewhere: works by young Korean artists and by their colleagues from Singapore, Macao, and the Philippines. To top it off, a three-day symposium was held to discuss the problems and possibilities of developing and sustaining new media art in Korea and other East Asian countries.

In his introduction to the catalogue curator Soojung Yi sketches FAST’s history and the rationale for the symposium. Next, the artists get a few pages each, while the lectures from the conference are published in a separate book (see review elsewhere in LDR). Unfortunately, only the artists whose works were presented in the central exhibition get more coverage than a bio, a short paragraph in the sub-exhibition’s intro, and a picture of their installation or a still from their video. As such, it is more an aid to memory for those who visited the exhibitions than a book of reference for curators or students.