Asian Art Spaces Network Meeting 2011, a brief report
The 2011 Gwangju (Korea) based symposium Asian Arts Space Network Meeting has spent its two day discussion (22-24 August) on two key subjects: firstly, Partnership for Developing New Asian Cultural Contents & Exhibitionand secondly, Sharing Archives among Asian Arts Spaces. Arguably, after Gwangju Biennale 2002 whose core subject was a review on the influence, discourse and structures of all alternative spaces worldwide, this has been the second time that a large-scale gathering of the most dynamic alternative spaces in Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Philippines has taken place.
The symposium was structured into two components. The first one included internal and public discussions and the second one was an exhibition where all invited Asian art spaces introduced their activities through screening short documentaries about them.
Why Asia? And why alternative spaces?
Director of alternative space LOOP (Seoul), Jin Suk Suh delivered a speech with a stress on the rise of Asian-ness in the contemporary art discourse around the world. He had noticed two distinct ways of approaching reality, which come from Western and Asian models respectively. The key distinction is that the former follows empirical and analytic inquiry, while the latter is grounded on transcendence and synthesis. Both ways, of course, share contributions to human being’s total view on reality, but Jin Suk Suh put a highlight on the advances of Asian model as it can help the subject to effectively capture the wholeness as well as all spirituous aspects of reality.
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