Loop Lab Busan: South Korea's new video art festival

article

DATE

03 Jun 2025

AUTHOR

Julia Flamingo

Loop Lab Busan: South Korea's new video art festival

AUTHOR

Julia Flamingo

"We've never written our art history because most of the countries in Asia were colonized by Western countries. So we have a blank space in our history of modern art. And now is the right time to rewrite the history of Asia for ourselves."

Jin Suk Suh's manifesto statement is as admirable as seeing him proudly circulate among the dozens of events at the festival he heads, taking on the task of fostering dialogue for the production of new histories of art in 21st-century Asia and Korea. Director of the Busan Museum of Art, Jin Suk Suh is one of the organizers of Loop Lab Busan, a video art and new technologies festival whose first edition took place between April 23 and 26 in Busan, a port city and the second largest metropolis in South Korea. As well as a fair and the exhibitions around the city, the program included the Future Museum Forum events, which brought 15 museums from 10 countries to the city, and the Asia Curators Forum, which focused on creating a network of connections between curators from Asia and discussing issues of identity and culture in the region.

Believe it or not, the epicenter of the festival is not a museum or a cultural center, but a hotel, one of those very luxurious ones, right on the sand and overlooking the sea. It all takes place on the 16th floor of the Grand Josun Busan Hotel, where the Loop Lab Fair takes over the labyrinthine carpeted corridors. Each room is occupied by an art gallery. Visitors are invited to sit on the sofas (or lie on the bed), and comfortably watch a video artwork. At a time when our attention span is getting shorter every day, you can count on your fingers who watch long video works in a cultural space. Here, the session turns into a chat with the stranger in the next bed.

This unique art-hotel experience is characteristic of Loop, the first fair dedicated to video art born in Barcelona. Created in 2003 to stimulate the market and the collection of video works, the fair co-founded by Emilio Álvarez sold almost no works in its first edition but gradually strengthened its brand and began to be frequented by regular visitors who were passionate about video art such as Jin Suk Suh himself, then director of the Nam June Paik Art Center. At a time when South Korea has never been more in the international spotlight and relevant to debates about the contemporary world, the Asian version of the fair aims to put Busan on the contemporary art international map.

"Twenty years ago, Korea's art scene was nothing. Today their cultural policies are unparalleled," says Loop Lab Busan curator Valentina Buzzi, who has lived in Seoul for five years and specializes in cultural relations between Korea and Europe. She comments on the festival's model of cooperation between the public and private sectors and explains how this kind of articulation was crucial from 1961 onwards, during the military dictatorship, which promoted the so-called Miracle of the Han River. After the devastation caused by the Korean War (1950-1953), which followed the violent Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), the country was one of the poorest in the world. In just a few decades, however, it has become one of the largest economies on the planet.

"South Korea is among the countries with the largest budgets dedicated to cultural diplomacy in the world. The government invests heavily in culture and then exports it strategically, through a combination of public and private initiatives,” says Buzzi.

Director of the Loop Lab fair, Amy Kim is also a young collector and entrepreneur and wants to give vent to the population's avid interest in art and the growing number of collectors among Koreans of her generation. The arrival of Frieze in Seoul in 2022, followed by the arrival of several international galleries, is both the cause and consequence of this flourishing. "When it comes to the art market, taxation and regulations in Korea are very favorable for collectors. Financially, collecting art is a great investment. There is no tax on the purchase of works by living Korean artists," Kim explains.

At the fair, 25 galleries from 12 countries were carefully selected by their team to exhibit only one, a maximum of two works in each of the hotel's rooms (Portugal was represented by Galeria Duarte Sequeira, from Braga). In the beautiful work Veil (2023) presented by Seoul's Amado Art Space, Korean artist Seo Young Chang films a disused apartment room, whose belongings are covered in ghostly white fabrics, to create a poetic video about the aging of the body and the loss of mobility. Sitting in bed, in the bedroom, the feeling of depression and the fragility of the narrated stories become even more real for those watching.

In another room, the Zink gallery exhibited the work Living Pits (2024) by the Turkish artist Erkan Özgen who, amid an arid setting, digs holes to put water and live fish, but brings up waste and a necessary discussion about sustainability and survival. The Àngels Barcelona gallery presented Lightning Dance (2018), by Argentinian Cecilia Bengolea, known for her videos of dancing bodies in different realities and contexts, as a tool of resistance, empathy, collective memory, and - always! - fun.

In our digital age, the festival aims to promote a new discourse on the moving image. Many works exhibited at the fair use artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality as tools for their productions. It is worth noting, however, that despite having an emphatic proposal on new technologies, the event still does not use NFTs to sell the works, which would be a natural solution for a fair dedicated to the moving image.

Perrotin Gallery presented Overview Effect (2025), by Jin Meyerson, a kaleidoscopic video created from the algorithms of his pixelated paintings with exquisite technique. In DRMNG (2025), Woonghyun Kim, from Korea's Gallery2, uses artificial intelligence to create a narrative about young Koreans and the housing crisis. Selected for Artist Focus, Taiwanese dancer and choreographer Wenchi Su combines science and movement in her work Sensing Dark Matter.

In the land of Nam June Paik (1932-2006), an artist considered the father of video art, whose visionary works anticipated the era of the Internet and social networks, a video art festival takes on yet another historical dimension. You can't help but wonder what he would think in 2025 when his native country is at the height of its international projection not only as a technological power but also as a cultural force capable of shaping discourses, aesthetics, and possible futures.

BIOGRAPHY

Julia Flamingo, a native of São Paulo, is a journalist and researcher specializing in contemporary art. Driven by a fervent commitment to making contemporary art more accessible, Julia established the digital platform Bigorna (@bigorna_art). She holds positions as the primary writer at the global network for art curators, Artpool.xyz, and as Curator & Writer of the Portuguese group Cultural Affairs. Julia has worked as an art journalist and critic at Veja São Paulo and contributed to celebrated cultural projects, including the Creative Europe-funded initiative 4Cs, the SP-Arte fair, and the São Paulo Biennial. She holds degrees in Journalism from Universidade Mackenzie, History from PUC-SP, and a Master's degree in Culture Studies from Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon.

ADVERTISING

article