VENICE — The ambitious goal of Rem Koolhaas’s 2014 Venice Architectural Biennale was to unite the national pavilions of the Giardini under a singular theme, hoping to avoid the cacophonous array of spectacles put on in Biennales past. He chose “Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014,” a look at 100 years of evolving national architectural identities as they absorbed the effects of globalization.
Over the past hundred years, the Korean peninsula has had much to absorb. Its own path to modernity was shaped in part by its unique geographical situation — a peninsula caught between two powers, China and Japan — which ultimately resulted in its division at the end of World War II. Since then, the Korean peninsula has been split in two nations that have radically diverged politically, culturally, and economically. Before the war, however, Korea was a singular entity united under Japanese colonial occupation. “Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula,” the exceptionally well executed Korean Pavilion of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, tells the modernization story of both halves before and after the great division.
The exhibition does not imagine a peninsula united, but rather examines the respective paths of two once-connected nations as they’ve been expressed through architecture. Pavilion commissioner Minsuk Cho of the Seoul-based practice MASS Studies had hoped to provide a holistic account of this history by enlisting curators from both the North and South, to create a landmark exhibition that would be the two states’ first collaborative engagement. The effort proved to be difficult, if not impossible.
“I was practically sending love letters to different people, ambassadors, with no response,” Cho told ARTINFO. “By mid-December, we had to decide to give up plan A.”
Lacking direct contact or participation from the North, Cho’s efforts evolved into a massive research project through a global network of collaborators, 39 in total, 19 of which are based in South Korea, the rest dispersed throughout the world. The resulting “hodgepodge of narrative fragments,” as Cho describes them — photographs, artwork, videos, and more — illustrate the disparate (although sometimes parallel) trajectories of Pyongyang and Seoul on both a physical and ideological level. A gallery adjacent to the main exhibition space, for example, features “Utopian Tours,” artwork collected by Nick Bonner, co-founder of a production company of North Korean media based in Beijing. His “Comrades of Construction” collection is a series of Norman Rockwell-esque construction site scenes dating back to the ’80s, subtly imbued with socialist, nationalist, and even Confucian elements. A lone youngster character reappears in a few, shining slightly brighter than his surrounding elders as a symbol of the prosperous future he will provide them.
In “Borders,” a section devoted to the Demilitarized Zone, the exhibition looks at the gaps punctuating the physical and psychic barrier between the two Koreas. It’s not an account of clandestine border crossings, but an illustration of overlooked connections. Images by the Italian photographer Alessandro Belgiojoso show DMZ guards standing at attention on both sides of a security checkpoint. Apart from the different stylings of rooftops and army uniforms, the thing worth noting is that in the North Korean picture, a branded Samsung air conditioner is visible in the foreground. As Brooklyn-based architect Yehre Suh’s “Actor Map of Korea,” 2014, charts, acts of transgression across the DMZ are most actively committed by such corporate entities, as well as NGOs and academic and religious groups, from Save the Children DPRK’s sewer line construction to Hyundai’s joint tourism projects with the North Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee.
Although broad in its scope, the exhibition unfolds without political condemnation. “We wanted to avoid the cliches of the divided state, of the trauma of war,” said Cho. “The whole point is to present an alternative way of looking at these two states through the building of a city,” to look beyond “media sensationalism.” And there are of course unexpected similarities between the two as their route to modernization ambled through various architectural styles. After the Korean War, the North faced the task of reconstructing a leveled capital and building a new utopian socialist future, while the South was later fueled by economic development that eventually led to the metropolitan boom that exists today. Photographs show the back-and-forth the two experienced between accepting international trends, the direct translation of traditional architecture into modern buildings, and the pursuit of an ever-elusive national style that in both places has resulted in high-density, high-rise residential buildings.
The exhibits fill every nook of the light-filled pavilion, including the glass of the skylight overhead. There, organizers printed excerpts from the late one-time architect Yi-Sang’s 1934 poem “Crow’s Eye View,” the title and the concept of the exhibition. Written before the division, the disjointed serial poem contrasts the idea of a bird’s-eye view, through which a universal truth can found by putting oneself at a distance, with reality, where a single cohesiveness often fails to exist. The seriality of the poem led to the graphic identity of pavilion, geometric shapes broken into pointilist formations of brightly, contrastingly colored dots. Those dots also symbolize the pavilion’s self-confessed state as a collection of individual pieces rather than a continuous narrative. It’s a story told in small increments, where the gaps in between become more visible as we look closer.
“The more I learn about North Korea, the more I realize how ignorant I am on the subject,” Cho said. “But this is a small step. I had this fantasy, hoping some day there would be two flags on each side of the pavilion door, or maybe even just one. Now this is just a bit of a rehearsal, a prologue, for that.”
