The Asia Culture Center Conference

Photos by Doug Stuber

Gwangju’s version of the U.S. city of Boston’s “Big Dig,” the Asian Cultural Center (ACC), is due to open in 2014 after the building and grounds are completed in December 2013.  With that in mind, those involved in the “Savage Garden of Knowledge,” an international symposium, have laid out both the real goals of the Center and its potential uses.  Curators, art directors, professors and performers gave a wide variety of reasons why the ACC has the potential to be such a success.

Lee Yong Chul, the President of the Institute of Asian Cultural Development (and an early curator of the Gwangju Biennale) listed: archival contents, the cross-disciplinary approach, performances, themed exhibitions, planned programs, programs for children, multi-functional Performance and Exhibition Halls, laboratories, a Sound Lab and even a Food Lab as part of a multi-layered Center that is “meant to be used, so please, come here and exhibit and perform.”

None of the presenters ventured to guess how the ACC would attract visitors from outside Gwangju, or inside Gwangju, so the positive economic impact can not be estimated until it comes true.  The impact for local artists, however, is slated to be larger than once thought imaginable, due to the commitment to having regular performances, and a multitude of themed exhibits.

How can the ACC serve both as a showpiece venue for all of Asia and represent local creators?  The key lies in how adaptable the building itself is.

Fram Kitiwaga, distinguished Japanese curator, gave the best reason to continue to foster art: “For 500 years the process of globalization has been led by missionaries, merchants and armies, and resulted in colonialism, imperialism and nationalism.  Under such circumstances spaces become homogenized and controlled, information is made consistent, and life and labor are standardized. Under the recent crisis of global warming, the collapse of financial capitalism, dissolution of community, decline of agriculture, proliferation of inequalities and apathy in societies, we have lost the feeling of physical embodiment and sensory richness, and have become nothing more than mechanical pieces of a robot, without any face. I am seeking out connections that engage the marginalized elements of society — the outsiders, the minority voices, the dead – for this is the very essence of art.”

Brend Shere, representative of Berlin’s House of World Cultures, also gave his advice: “The new ways of making ideas via research and art-making are being segmented by specialist who use untranslatable jargon and become detached from society.  The universal approach to academia no longer works in the entire world, so when you are launching a multi-cultural Arts Center, you should allow each country to define itself via its creativity.”

Shere further mentioned that though in Berlin, the House of World Cultures, in 1989 just before the Berlin Wall came down, the art world was seen as First, Second and Third World, and the “museum” was focused on Africa, Asia and Latin America.  “After 75 years the house was ‘purified’ through the ‘Walls and Windows’ project so that it encompassed a larger world view, as the old world view no longer made sense.  Only the architecture, a 1957 gift from the U.S., was left behind.”

The new ACC building has a chance to internationalize the entire cultural scene in Gwangju.  Not just once a year at the Gwangju Biennale or the Design Biennale; and not just via the Architectural Follies that are continually growing.  The ACC will internationalize through a living, working flexible structure that invites locals to collaborate not just with living artists, but with digitally archived material as well.

If enough international collaboration in performing, visual, audio, video, animation and conceptual arts take root, then the ACC will attract people from out of town.  This is why it has been worth the investment of time and money: not just as an economic generator, but for a chance for blue collar and white collar residents to mingle under the umbrella and strike a chord to summon the creativity in all of us.