A Zone of Discovery
Tessa Peters
The Song of the Wind explores the potential of artistic thinking and activity in connection with the practice of everyday life in Yaksan-myeon, creating a synergy that aims to bring social, cultural, environmental and ecological benefits to the village, and the wider environment of the island. The island is part of the extensive archipelago off the southwestern coast of the Korean peninsula in the South Sea, and the primary industries of the area are fishing and seaweed farming. In setting up a series of situations where artists, architects, local people, seasonal migrant workers and others can informally exchange ideas, Song of the Wind seeks to establish a broad forum within which to share observations and raise aspirations for the area. Rather than ‘Art’ conceived as a specialist sphere of cultural knowledge that serves to differentiate the initiated from others, the project is founded on the more inclusive idea that, as an element of wider collective and collaborative activity, art can open up new ways of thinking and doing. Its instigator and artistic director, Dr. Sunyoung Oh, was the curatorial catalyst behind comparable initiatives in both Korea and Indonesia. These past projects, dating from 2014, formed the body of her Ph.D. research in which she interrogated her previous work and its outcomes to arrive at new methodological propositions in the curatorial field of social engagement. 1 She brings all this experience and reflective work, along with associated ethical considerations, to her development of Song of the Wind. Her inspiration for the name of the project came from the strong sea breezes of the region and is the title of a song by the famous Korean singer Yongpil Cho. Residents of Yaksan-myeon performed the song for the soundtrack of the project’s promotional video.
The project can be understood in different ways. Operating outside the walls of a physical art institution it is most easily identified as a public art project - particularly as all individuals living or temporarily resident in the area were encouraged to become invested in its activities. For example, members of Haeyum, a local organization dedicated to ecological education and cooperative learning, entered into creative conversations with visiting artist Soo Kyung Lee; one manifestation of their exchange of ideas is the striking mural that has become the new landmark of Dangmok Port.
Nearly thirty years ago, writer and art critic Lucy Lippard chose to define public art ‘as accessible work of any kind that cares about, challenges and consults the audience for or with whom it is made, respecting community and environment.’2 This represented a progressive perspective at a time when most examples of public art operated on a top-down principle, where often irrelevant artworks were foisted on a community with the intention of ‘enhancing’ people’s lives but without any meaningful interaction with them. It was a situation not far removed from the convention of gallery-based, market-driven painting and sculpture, where artists present their artworks to a viewing public fully formed. Over the following decade, what Lippard was advocating in terms of artists working with communities and localities was to become more common in many parts of the world. There is plentiful evidence of a rapid increase in socially engaged practices; they are now prominent within all the principal contact zones of global contemporary art, including its biennales and chief sites of discourse.3 Whether the impetus behind such work is political activism, protest against social and political injustice, or a response to the divisive tendencies of contemporary capitalism,4 what is foregrounded is the radical potential of art and design. Such socially collaborative practice is sometimes also referred to as ‘dialogical art practice,’ a term coined by art historian Grant Kester to define ‘projects organized around conversational exchange and interaction,’5 thereby calling attention to its principal strategy.
Song of the Wind, with its artistic focus on the population and activity of Yaksan-myeon, can also be recognized as a placemaking art project, an idea described by curator and theorist Cara Courage as,
- “… a mode of arts-based activity in the public realm … The artist might be an instigator and a catalyst of activity, but they will work in equanimity with the community to create shared outcomes and outputs, and their aim will be to ‘hand over’ as it were, the life and legacy of the project to the community … it demands you get out into the public realm and are hands-on with it, conversing with the people of it, questioning the politics of it.”
6
Developing the curatorial framework of Song of the Wind involved listening and responding to the needs of local people to ensure measurable practical and beneficial outcomes for the community, as well as laying the groundwork for less tangible outcomes that may only be recognizable in the longer term. For example, to provide accommodation for the project’s international residency program, YIAN Architects (Jiin Kim and Changgyu Choi) were commissioned to renovate an existing community-owned building; they worked in consultation with local agents on a design creating a comfortable and restful space in harmony with its location. Relatively modest in size and layout, it comprised two bedrooms with bathrooms, one for male and one for female residents, plus a shared communal living space. The residency house also included items of well-designed functional furniture by designer woodworker Byeongseok Kim.7 The renovations necessary to serve the needs of the temporary artist-residents meant that when the building was returned to community use, its condition was significantly enhanced.
The designated periods of the Song of the Wind residency program were scheduled to coincide with Yaksan-myeon’s seaweed harvesting seasons of May to June (kelp) and September to November (cheonggak and other varieties), and the artists selected from an international open call were asked to sign up for paid work in the local seaweed farming industry. This stipulation, in agreement with local farmers, aimed to narrow any perceived gap between the artist-researchers and local people; it was designed to fulfil the labour requirement of the local economy, while also offering the temporary resident artists some understanding of the lives of local people and migrant workers. Yet not all the artists were able to adapt to the demands of the kelp harvest, with its early starts and long working days. In addition, those without a good working understanding of the Korean language or that of their migrant co-workers reported finding it hard to gain a good-enough understanding of what was required of them – in such circumstances grabbing one’s phone to enlist assistance from Google Translate was not an option. The failure to comprehend an instruction is inevitably a weakness when a designated task depends on a highly coordinated collaborative choreography with co-workers. But while this could understandably become a source of disappointment for all concerned, it nonetheless gave the artists a strong appreciation of the skills and stamina of their fellow workers.
Gatari Surya Kusuma, a researcher, curator, and artist based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, was one of the first group of participants to undertake a project-related residency in Yaksan-myeon, arriving in May 2023. She is a firm believer in creating situations where there can be a positive cross-fertilization between art, learning, and life, and this comes from her involvement with various collectives in Indonesia, including the KUNCI Study Forum & Collective and, subsequently, its School of Improper Education.8 The work of the latter has been to counteract prevailing social and political pressures by adopting non-hierarchical systems of learning and knowledge exchange and acknowledging the value of wisdom derived from everyday life. Gatari explains that her collective-orientated practice has helped her to realize that collaborations are not necessarily about achieving immediate results but establishing negotiations; from this perspective, an instance of failure is not viewed as a final outcome, but something from which one can learn as part of an ongoing process. Her experience of working as a member of a collective has also taught her the importance of each person being able to recognize their own talents or privileges and of sharing these with the group in order to increase its overall power or efficacy.
Gatari was fully involved with the kelp harvest in Yaksan-myeon. On days off (when periods of wet weather interrupt the harvest) she made notes on her personal experiences of seaweed farming, the infrastructure of the farming community and its seasonal migrant workers. Speaking about collective work on the farm, she points out that the pressure to work hard, keep up with the pace and pull her weight came from her Thai co-workers. She is proud of having gained new skills, such as being able to gauge when the kelp is sufficiently dry to pack, or when it is of the highest quality.
In June, Gatari held a drawing and storytelling workshop for children at the Haeyum Community Centre titled Stories from My Ocean, My Seaweed, and My Hometown. In this, she asked the children to think about the meaning of the sea in their lives, and what was their favourite seaweed to eat. Her immersion in the seaweed harvest has fired her curiosity about the differences between seaweed farming in South Korea and her native Indonesia. She has found that, whereas in West Java seaweed farming has been ousted by the more lucrative mining industry, in Bali and Lombok seaweed cultivation still exists, although in comparison to Korea, it is a comparatively marginal economic activity; while it has export value and more local cosmetic and medicinal applications it is not part of Indonesian food culture. Returning to Indonesia in early July she resolved to find out more, making contact with NGOs and other organizations in Indonesia with the intention of expanding her research and its potential.9
Another Indonesian artist-in-residence between May and June 2023 was Vincent Rumahloine, a member of the Rakarsa Collective based in Bandung, West Java, whose art practice is centred on fostering and hosting knowledge-sharing networks. He was employed by a small kelp farm but discovered he was unsuited to the work, eventually finding another way to gain an understanding of the place and its people. Over the past three years, Vincent has been working with the mothers and homemakers of a small community in Bandung, and it was their development of a gardening co-op that initially prompted him to take an interest in the growing activities of the women of the Wando region. From his experience of working with women’s groups he recognizes the positive effects that such social and locally focused initiatives can have on society as a whole. During his residency, he also came into contact with members of Haeyum, and made a video of their mural painting work to both record and understand the nature of their collaborative process – subsequently sharing the video and information with the women’s group in Bandung. But although Vincent was hoping to establish an ongoing knowledge exchange network connecting the Korean women with similar groups of women in Indonesia, the language barrier has proved rather more difficult to overcome than he anticipated.10
Christine Mackey is an independent research-based visual artist from Ireland. While the language barrier was a major obstacle to her work on the seaweed harvest, her artistic practice provided her with alternative means to engage with the environment of Yaksan-myeon and its surrounding area. She describes the primary research interests of her residency as concentrated “… on the study of marine plant communities (macro-algae and micro-algae) and their embedded cultural, social and scientific relationships with the human world” in particular how “they play out their agency in watery environments.” The environmental ideas deeply rooted in her practice concern the ecology of place; in the case of Wando-gun this acknowledges the entangled and complex ecology of the islands, which includes the consequences of the use of various plastics in the cultivation and harvest of seaweed, the effects of the eco-system on non-human species, as well as the transformative powers of biological material. Christine has also been thinking about her research in Wando-gun in relation to her research on seaweed culture and cultivation in Ireland, where different environmental, cultural, historical and legal issues pertain. Some of the writers and thinkers that inform her approach she cites as Natasha Myers, in particular, her concept of the ‘Planthroposcene’; Anna Tsing’s views about making space for collaborative processes between plants and people that could be the key to our survival; and Bruno Latour’s proposition that people need to rethink the notion of nature as “green, global, unanimous and nice.”11
A keen gardener, Christine brought seed potatoes and cabbage seeds to Wando from Ireland. She planted these with the help of local women, but while the cabbage seeds did not take, the potatoes were more successful. On her daily walks, she also undertook a mapping of the terrestrial plants of the area, noting where they could be found and their local uses. Over the course of the residency, Christine used a range of methods to record both her marine and land-orientated fieldwork, among them drawing, digital and cameraless photography, video, sound recording, collecting objects and fragments, writing poetry and other kinds of texts. Her approach was to physically process and assemble materials, combining the natural with the synthetic, thereby opening up “a dialogue with the materials/matters, the research, the site and the wider conditional issues.”12
For the mural project in Dangmok Port - referred to earlier - Paris and Seoul-based artist Soo Kyung Lee worked in collaboration with a female duo of local amateur mural painters, Yukyung Lee and Sunhee Bang, members of Haeyum. Soo Kyung explains their approach, noting that providing the port building with a strong visual identity was a practical concern, “so that people who come and go can easily remember and find it.” 13 The exuberance of Soo Kyung’s colourful graphic paintings is derived from her improvisational style of composition, and she has been able to encourage the Haeyum artists to adopt a new approach to colour, helping them to further develop their artistic range and knowledge. The results of a further collaboration between the artists brought unexpected vibrancy and cohesion to a stretch of otherwise disparate waterfront buildings in Eodu-ri.
The first period of Song of the Wind also saw the Ambiguous Dance Company arrive in Yaksan-myeon for a week’s residency. Ambiguous was founded in 2011 by choreographer Boram Kim, and began to draw attention from the dance world by winning the Best Performance award at the CJ Young Festival with Boleroin 2008. Members of the dance company worked on the seaweed harvest and could be encountered devising the choreography for a video over the course of their working day on the kelp farm; this video performance was filmed by Song of the Wind photographer and videographer Jaehoon Choi.14 The Ambiguous team (Boram Kim, Seonhwa Park, Hak Lee, Kyeongmin Jang, Bokwon Seo and Jihyun Han) also filmed another video, which captures them reflecting on their responses to life in the region and documents a conversation with members of a local kelp farming family (Giloon Park, Mihwa Song and Sejun Choi). Both videos are available to view on the project website. Ambiguous regularly present their work across a range of platforms, helping them to reach new audiences and spread their influence.
Marco Kusumawijaya was an associate researcher on the Song of the Wind. An architect by training, he was co-founder of Rujak Center for Urban Studies in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2010 and served as its director until 2017. He was chair and director of the Jakarta Arts Council (2006-2010), co-founded and built Yogyakarta’s Bumi Pemuda Rahayu Center (2012), which hosts workshops and residency programs for artists working on issues of ecology and community, and since 2021 has been a member of the Jakarta Academy, advising the government on artistic and cultural issues. Marco’s period of research in Yaksan-myeon focused on three main themes: the island's geography and geology, the seasonal migrant workers of the Wando region, and the identification of different types of space. In early June 2023, he presented his findings in a lecture titled ‘Sustainable Community’ to the Architecture Department of Pusan National University. In this, he considered ways of achieving coexistence between migrant workers and local people, the potential for intercultural community, and he raised the need for new thinking about existing public and semi-public space in the area.15 His lecture also provided an initial briefing for members of the BK21 architectural research group from Pusan National University, who subsequently visited Yaksan-myeon as participants in the Song of the Wind project in August 2023. The focus of their research was the development potential of the island’s underused spaces and their detailed report, with further contextual information, was made available to the second group of artists-in-residence.
I had an opportunity to visit Yaksan-myeon at the start of the second residency period, in early September 2023. By that time, Wan Chantavilasvong, photographer and urban planner from Thailand and Zeke Sales, community and performance artist from the Philippines, were just beginning to settle into the residency house. I accompanied the artists as Dr Oh helped to orientate them within the locality, introducing them to local people and services – the convenience store, the café, the recycling point, where to catch the bus etc. Together we visited the seaweed exhibition centre in Wando (the main town around an hour from Yaksan by bus). This offered the artists a useful introduction to the species farmed in the region and the wider uses of the seaweed harvest, as well as its importance to the local economy. Other orientating visits included a visit to see the murals painted at Dangmok Port and in Eodu-ri village by Haeyum in collaboration with Sookyung Lee; there was also a meeting with members of Haeyum at their base in Gogeum-myeon; a trip to Samun mountain, home to Yaksan’s herd of black goats, and an introduction to the elders at the community centre local to the residency house.
I could see that there were a number of significant differences between the first residency period and the second. For example, the second group of Song of the Wind artists did not have to meet the requirement of undertaking work on the seaweed farms, and this offered them more time to explore the area, to bond with one another and socially engage with local residents. Another fortuitous difference was the bus ride between Yaksan and Wando was now free. The latter proved to be both practically and socially helpful; the hour’s bus ride each way offered plenty of opportunities to engage with local people, especially the elders of the community. The cultural mix of the second group was also beneficial. 3 of 4 of the first group of residents were Indonesian, which meant that the non-Indonesian member of the group might feel excluded if the others communicated in a language they didn’t understand or if they made cultural references with which they had no direct experience. In contrast for the second group of Filipino, Portuguese and Thai nationals, English was the common language. Their different backgrounds also meant they frequently needed to explain and share the cultural perspectives they brought to the circumstances of the residency.
Over the time I spent with Wan and Zeke I observed their very different points of focus. Wan’s direction of vision tended to be seaward ㅡ she liked to photograph the seascape or the detritus that washed up along the shoreline. In contrast, Zeke tended to look to the land, smelling, tasting and collecting examples of plants, noting what was growing at different points in our walk. He was also interested in local histories, soon finding the nearby shrine of the Blood Rock and noticing the abundance of fungi growing in its vicinity. All this time we discussed some initial thoughts about what might be effective and relevant ways to develop artistic projects with the people of Yaksan and neighbouring areas.
Returning to Seoul I met with Daniel Duarte Pereira, Portuguese architect and researcher, newly arrived from Europe and in transit to Yaksan. I was able to brief him on the interests of his fellow artists-in-residence and our discussions, and on the local contacts they had made so far. I had a feeling there might be a good synergy of interests within this second group of artists. It must surely be the case that the first group of artists arriving in Yaksan had a harder time establishing their value and potential contribution to the community, but by the time the second group of artists arrived, the idea of the residency and its temporary influx of foreigners was accepted by local people.
After leaving Korea I had occasional contact with the artists by Zoom and through their activities on Instagram.16 Through these platforms, I was able to appreciate their friendly exchanges with elders on the Wando-Yaksan bus and they kept me informed of their project-related activities: Zeke's music-making with young pansori singers; Wan’s diving expeditions that allowed her access to the underwater environments she wanted to photograph whilst also taking images that were useful to local farmers and fishermen; the plans for Wan and Daniel’s workshops which they were devising for participants ranging from local children to elders. In one email Daniel spoke of being captivated by the vast scale of seaweed farming in the Wando region; seaweed, he noted, “is an active agent in shaping this landscape”.17 However, he admitted to finding the language barrier a significant challenge; it made it difficult for him to fully grasp what was happening, how things operated, and in forging connections with the Yaksan community. His solution was to create a collection of the unique materials and stories that he encountered during his stay. This collection served as a catalyst for a broader, more interconnected dialogue with the community. He compiled the collection into a deck of cards, with each card representing a distinct material story with biological organisms, such as various types of seaweed, as well as images of man-made structures common to the area. The cards then served as a means of communication with the community and formed the basis of his workshop activities.
Outputs from the second residency period included: Wan’s workshops “Yaksan Through Time: Photo Stories of, from and by the People of Yaksan”, in which she encouraged both young people and elders to contribute images representing their sense of place; and Daniel’s workshops titled “Entangled Encounters with Seaweed” where children pressed and drew samples of chonggak, also contributing their thoughts on what the seaweed meant to them and — from their personal experience of it — what an alternative name for the seaweed might be. The workshops resulted in participants creating cards they could keep but also ones that were posted to people around the world, broadcasting the children’s ideas and inviting responses to them. In a comparable vein, Zeke’s project “Seasonal Labour and the Migrations of Seaweed” involved a workshop with Filipino migrant workers in which they created postcards and wrote about their work abroad to their families back home. These postcards were later taken back to the Philippines by Zeke and posted to the designated recipients. Zeke also created performance works. The first titled “Over Half-a Century Salvage”, was staged on the roof of the residency house, and aiming to evoke memories of historical alignments between Korea and the Philippines, and the populations that suffered the consequences. Another took place at the end of the residency period at Samun Mountain around the time of Chuseok Thanksgiving. For this Zeke collaborated with Korean-Danish choreographer Suh Yeong-Ran, the pansori singers of the local Bae family, as well as fellow artists-in-residence Wan and Daniel, together with young people from the area, to create an allegorical story rooted in the site. In addition, as a result of conversations between Song of the Wind’s artistic director, Dr. Sunyoung Oh, artists Gatari Surya Kusma, Wan Chantavilasvong, Daniel Duarte Pereira, Zeke Sales and myself, a small book has been published. Titled Pung-Mi it has been inspired by the seaweed of Yaksan-myeon, connecting its stories with those of other places around the world.
All of this constitutes a zone of discovery, an experimental laboratory where ideas are put to the test. There have been several visible outcomes as a result of the Song of the Wind project; others will need more time to grow and develop, and for their effects to be fully felt. Grant Kester points out that any complex collaborative project such as this, one that unfolds over months and has no clearly discernible endpoint, requires time to evaluate.18 What has been learned already is that successful social engagement and collaboration require participants to engage in an open dialogue. It is also important to create an empty space of permission, rather than one that directs the citizen-participant. In terms of its primary aims, Song of the Wind brought artists and local people closer and opened up new discussions on how to enhance the local environment. Ultimately, the work of the project has not simply been to exhibit or commission artworks but to encourage new sites of interaction and knowledge exchange, with a view to making more things happen and triggering sustainable and long-lasting change in Yaksan-myeon.
1 Sunyoung Oh (2021). Curating Arts on the Edge of an Unstable Society, PhD thesis University of Westminster: Westminster School of Arts. Available at: https://doi.org/10.34737/vwv1x The research considers several different projects presented in Korea and Indonesia in light of recent critiques of social engagement as discussed by artists, curators, and theorists including Nicolas Bourriaud, Charles Esche, Boris Groys, Thomas Hirschhorn, Grant Kester, Maria Lind and others.
2 Lucy Lippard (1995). ‘Looking Around: Where We Are, Where We Could Be.’ In Suzanne Lacy (ed.), Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press, pp. 114-130.
3 ruangrupa, the Indonesian collective, were selected as curators of the internationally high-profile Documenta 15 (Kassel, Germany, 2022). Their curatorial approach, its reception and potential legacy is explored in an interview published in Art Review, 26 Sept 2022. Available at: https://artreview.com/who-is-exploiting-who-ruangrupa-on-documenta-fifteen/
4 Katherine Bruhn considers examples of socially engaged art practice in Indonesia in her paper, Katherine Bruhn (2015), ‘Art and Social Engagement in Yogyakarta, Indonesia: Ketjilbergerak and the Legacy of Taring Padi.’ Seismopolite 13. Available at: https://www.seismopolite.com/art-and-social-engagement-in-yogyakarta-indonesia-ketjilbergerak-and-the-legacy-of-taring-padi-i ; the context of socially engaged art practice in Korea is discussed in Sunyoung Oh’s thesis (2021), Curating Arts on the Edge of an Unstable Society; for a critique of the political and institutional complexities that underpin socially engaged art practice in Europe and the USA see Claire Bishop (2012), Artificial Hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London & New York: Verso.
5 Grant H. Kester (2011). The One and The Many: Contemporary collaborative art in a global context. Durham & London: Duke University Press, p. 8.
6 Cara Courage (2020). ‘The radical potential of placemaking’, in Courage, C., Borrup, T., Rosario, J M., Legge, K., McKeown, A., Platt, L., & Schupbach, J. (eds), The Routledge Book of Placemaking. London: Routledge, [TP1] p. 220.
7 From YIAN Architects’ responses to a questionnaire received 21 June 2023.
8 KUNCI Study Forum & Collective; The School of Improper Education (2020). Critical Times, 1 December 2020.
9 From online interviews with Gatari Surya Kusuma, 9 June and 9 July 2023.
10 From online interviews with Vincent Rumahloine, 9 June 2023 and Sunyoung Oh, 25 June 2023.
11 See: Natasha Myers (2021). ‘How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene’, ABC News, 6 Jan 2021. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/natasha-myers-how-to-grow-liveable-worlds:-ten-not-so-easy-step/11906548 ; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Bruno Latour (2017). ‘How to rediscover our ground after nature?’ in ARoS Triennial, The Garden – End of Times; Beginning of Times. London: Koenig Books.
12 From online interview with Christine Mackey, 6 June, and her responses to a questionnaire, received 9 June 2023.
13 Quote from Soo Kyung Lee’s response to a questionnaire, received 25 June 2023.
14 From online interview with Sunyoung Oh, 25 June 2023.
15 From online interview with Marco Kusumawijaya, 9 June 2023.
16 Zoom meetings with the second group of project artists took place 15 & 29 September and 1 October.
17 Quote from email received from Daniel Duarte Pereira, 14 September 2023.
18 See Grant H. Kester. (2013). ‘The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism,’ E-flux journal, # 50, Dec 2013. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/50/59990/the-device-laid-bare-on-some-limitations-in-current-art-criticism/