May Flower

A Special Exhibition Commemorating
the 30th Anniversary of
Gwangju Uprising

The May Flower project is a reflection on a historical event that took place in Gwangju in May 1980, which was thirty years ago. What happened is a painful memory in which hundreds of civilians, including students, rose up against the then military dictatorship and fell victims to the violent suppression by the armed forces of the country. The appellation of the victims have changed over the years, from being called "mobsters" thirty years ago to later being reinstated as "guardians of democracy;" and the shabby graveyard, where they were buried, later became a national cemetery. The smallest of all the national cemeteries in the world is in Gwangju.

Taking art exhibitions and a symposium as a looking glass, we would like to take a different approach in recollecting this event from other usual methods. Thus instead of placing the mirror directly in front of the events that took place a generation ago, we will forgo recollecting the urgency and tension of the spring days in Gwangju thirty years ago and focus our sight on our lives, and the issues we as the public face, today, May 2010.

Thus, the May Flower project is not a narrative about a past history; it is not about particular characters, places, or time from the past and the painful memory of recollecting them. Instead, it is about the stories of the local people a generation later who have inherited the history and it comprises the viewpoints of artists from other countries who know the story of Gwangju. It has been conceived to avoid mummifying the Gwangju event into a bygone history and to make it live in the present, the evolutionary and on-going present that is very much the inner fabric, living and breathing within us, today.

Most of the artists participating in May Flower are of the view that art cannot be practiced for art’s sake and that it is not a private activity; they are of the view that art reflects reality and that it is a public practice. They recognizehistorical consciousness, tradition, human rights, family and other values for humanity and have spoken on their behalf. However, the selection of the artists was not so much based on what is right or wrong instead, it was made as a suggestion for invigorating the language of art exhibition and enriching discourses on aesthetics. It must be added that the purpose of the May Flower project rests on giving a role to a locale ?the city of Gwangju in this case-- where one can examine the issues of mass culture and public participation as if looking through a magnifying glass. So this curator asked the participants to not be too beholden to the history of Gwangju but to have fun with what they are doing; to not think too much about Gwangju Uprising but to reflect on the potential of Gwangju, a beautiful yet desolate city near the southwestern tip of the Korean peninsula.

As a part of the opening activities for the exhibition, critics, scholars, curators, and collectors will be gathered together and discuss the issues of art production and consumption the systems of power and market; and public and artistic engagement. We want to approach the 30th anniversary of the May 18, or Gwangju Uprising, through the framework of cultural issues and art, rather than through a political or historical discussion, and thereby distinguish this symposium from various other events commemorating the anniversary.

The symposium is conceived to suggest that we use art market as a critical tool, making it a neologism that paradoxically takes on the writings of the Frankfurt School which looked at the cultural phenomena of the mid-20th century capitalism as an industry and coined the term "culture industry." That is to say, art belonged to the sphere of creative efforts rather than that of an industry, and it existed in a symbiotic relationship with art patrons and art lovers. However, today, in contemporary art the market is the power, and artistic currents are led not by critical discourses but by collectors’ tastes; contemporary art is degenerating into an open-air market system devoid of critique. Until now we have visited these phenomena invoking "art market" or "art and power" as conceptual tools. There is a need to re-visit this "art industry," the meta-phenomenon of a bizarre scale, with the invocation of the citizen spirit of Gwangju and its spirit of resistance, regardless of the terminologies used.

It is true that globalization of art market and the growth of its phenomenal size stimulate and facilitate critical discourses and questions produced by visual art in the capitalist market system and the era of mass culture that we live in today. Of course, one has to be mindful of the fact that they also give rise to the problem of reducing the historical concerns about unwarranted faith in the market system into local and localized discourses.