KOREA. GOLDEN LION

Yesterday we announced here in METALOCUS the prizes awarded by the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Now, we present the Korean pavilion, which won the Golden Lion.

Golden Lion for Best National Participation to Korea

Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula

Sekwon Ahn, Alessandro Belgiojoso, Nick Bonner (featuring Mansudae Art Studio and anonymous artists and architects of North Korea), Marc Brossa, Onejoon Che, Charlie Crane, Maxime Delvaux, Min Cho Jun, Ik-Joong Kang, Karolis Kazlauskas & PLT Planning and Architecture Ltd., Dongsei Kim, Hanyong Kim, Kichan Kim, Seok Chul Kim & Franco Mancuso, Kim Swoo Geun, Young June Lee, Chris Marker, Philipp Meuser, Hoon Moon, MOTOElastico, Osamu Murai, Peter Noever (featuring the North Korean architects exhibited in Flowers for Kim Il Sung, MAK, 2010), Kyong Park (featuring Nam June Paik and the artists of the Project DMZ, Storefront for Art and Architecture, 1988), James Powderly, Kyungsub Shin, Hyun-Suk Seo (featuring Kim Jong Hui et al.), Yehre Suh, Yi Sang, Dongwoo Yim.

Commissioner/Curator.- Minsuk Cho. Curators.- Hyungmin Pai, Changmo Ahn. Deputy Curator.- Jihoi Lee.

Pavilion at Giardini.

The motivations of the International Jury.

The jury wishes to recognize Korea with a Golden Lion for the extraordinary achievement of presenting a new and rich body of knowledge of architecture and urbanism in a highly charged political situation. Using diverse modes of representation that encourage interaction, it is research-in-action, which expands the spatial and architectural narrative into a geopolitical reality.

Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the Korean Peninsula was divided in two. Within the polarizing global and state systems of the Cold War, a society and culture that had maintained a unified state entity for more than a millennium evolved radically divergent yet irrevocably interconnected economic, political, and ideological systems. The trauma of war and adversarial politics have too often sensationalized and over-simplified this condition, reproducing clichés and prejudices that obscure the complexity and possibilities that lie in the Peninsula’s past, present, and future. In the Korean Pavilion, the architecture of North and South Korea is presented as an agent - a mechanism for generating alternative narratives that are capable of perceiving both the everyday and the monumental in new ways.

The Korean Pavilion is inspired by “Crow’s Eye View,” a poem by the Korean architect-turned-poet Yi Sang (1910 -1937). In contrast to the singular and universalizing perspective bird’s eye view, the crow’s eye view points to the impossibility of a cohesive grasp of not only the architecture of a divided Korea but the idea of architecture itself. Like uncharted patches of an irregular globe, a diverse range of work produced by architects, urbanists, poets and writers, artists, photographers and film-makers, curators and collectors forms a multiple set of research programmes, entry nodes, and points of view. They call attention to the urban and architectural phenomena of the planned and the informal, individual and collective, the heroic and the everyday. Intertwined yet in opposition, spilling over to each other, they reveal the way that a wide range of architectural interventions have reflected and shaped the life of the Korean Peninsula. The Korean Pavilion reveals the Korean Peninsula as both symptom and agent, both archetype and anomaly of the tumultuous global trajectory of the past 100 years.

Dates.- 07 June 2014 - 23 November 2014.
Venue.- Pavilions at Giardini. Venice, Italy.