Cheongju Craft Biennale explores where the future of art is headed

Kang Jae-young, artistic director of the 13th Cheongju Craft Biennale, speaks during a press conference last Thursday in central Seoul. [CHEONGJU CRAFT BIENNALE]

For the 13th edition of the Cheongju Craft Biennale, titled “The Geography of Objets,” learning about the stories behind each craft is likened to looking at a map.

“It’s like how, whenever we go someplace new, we have to look at a map,” Kang Jae-young, artistic director for this biennale, said during a press conference on Thursday. Kang is the CEO of Mangrove Artworks and specializes in curating craft exhibitions.

“The same goes for crafts; they are the result of turning natural materials into objet d’art, so with this edition of the biennale, we tried to draw a map of crafts and explore the direction they are headed right now in the 21st century.”

Hosted by the city of Cheongju in North Chungcheong, the biennale first started in 1999 and is set to kick off on Sept. 1 this year at the cigarette factory-turned-cultural complex Cheongju Culture Factory, which is next to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Cheongju branch.

The biennale will run until Oct. 15.

A total of 96 artists from 18 different nations will participate in this edition, with the proportion of local and international artists being almost equally split down the middle. Another noteworthy aspect is that about 80 percent of the crafts on view will be new works.

Across five different sections, the biennale aims to explore different genres, sustainability, techniques, history and the future of crafts.

Cheongju is an important city when it comes to Korean crafts. It was the very area that first printed the world’s oldest existing book printed with movable metal type, Jikji. Ironware had also flourished in the area in ancient times.

“Crafts were essential when making Jikji,” Kang said. “It requires hanji [traditional Korean mulberry paper], brushes, inkstone and meok [traditional East Asian black ink]. That’s why we included a section in which we show an ASMR video of seven intangible cultural assets [craftspeople] based in Cheongju or other cities in North Chungcheong printing the texts and compiling them.”

One of the 96 artists who paid a visit to the press conference is Jurgen Bey, a Dutch designer who was named as one of the ambassadors for this edition of the biennale. On the same day, Bey emphasized the importance of reinventing heritage by educating the current generation on the techniques and skills.

Lee Sang-hyeob, a craftsperson best known for his silver jars with countless hammer marks on their surfaces, teased that his latest pieces at the biennale will depart from the original jar shape and “revert to primitive techniques.”

“The last edition [in 2021] was held during the pandemic, so the focus was on exhibiting crafts,” Kang said. “But for this one, we added more hands-on programs like craft workshops and lectures from the craftspeople. We hope that everyone will be able to enjoy and discuss crafts better this way.”

BY SHIN MIN-HEE [shin.minhee@joongang.co.kr]