The Visible and the Concealed – Back from the Busan Biennial Sea Art Festival

When I arrive in Busan to co-direct the Sea Art Festival 2025, the scale of the challenge becomes immediately clear. Dadaepo Beach is not only one of Korea’s most beautiful coastal landscapes; it is also a site where industrial history, ecological fragility, and urban development converge. Preparing an exhibition in such a context means engaging with both its visible beauty and its invisible tensions. Together with my Co-Director Keumhwa Kim, we choose to approach the theme Undercurrents: Waves Walking on the Water as an invitation to look beneath the surface—at the social, ecological, and political forces shaping the place.

Developing a Shared Curatorial Vision

Discovering Local Voices of artists, scientists and engaged citizen

Among the most resonant discoveries of artists based in Busan are the collective OMIJA and the artist Hyeong-Seob Cho. OMIJA operates at the intersection of community art, ecology, and food culture. For the festival, they create a monumental two-metre-wide bowl composed entirely of native and heirloom seeds, referencing local biodiversity and agricultural memory. During key festival moments, audiences are invited to roll the bowl and add their own seeds — an evolving ritual of participation and shared responsibility.
Hyeong-Seob Cho deeply impresses us during a studio visit. One full wall is covered with annotated volumes of Marx and texts on contemporary theory, revealing his engagement with structures of power and the nature of artistic institutions. His new video work, The Sentinel, filmed in the disused Dadae Incineration Plant, features a single animatronic bird perched on industrial ruins—part guardian, part witness—symbolically protecting the space from urban transformation.

Continuing long-term dialogues with artists

The festival also becomes a platform for extending long-standing conversations initiated through (re)connecting.earth. Artists such as Marie Griesmar, Uriel Orlow, Diana Lelonek, and Raul Walch continue to explore new production materials or concepts they investigate in previous editions, maintaining research that is both site-specific and attentive to the global ecosystem.

In Busan, Marie Griesmar presents Phytocene, an underwater installation on the east side of Dadaepo Beach. It invites visitors to snorkel and encounter delicate ceramic sculptures modeled after phytoplankton — organisms essential to the marine carbon cycle. Their visibility underwater subtly echoes the often-overlooked non-human beings that sustain terrestrial life.
Uriel Orlow brings Reveries of Collective Walkers, a participatory sound walk and performative reading. Along a designated eco-trail, participants read aloud to plants—rituals of exchange that shift the act of reading into a shared ecological gesture, connecting language, breath, and vegetal life.
Raul Walch’s contribution extends this participatory spirit. From the bamboo pavilion he builds with textiles evoking the feathers of birds, visitors are invited to launch handmade kites into the sky. These open workshops offer moments of joy and reflection, transforming spectators into participants who experience wind, material, and motion as shared creative forces.

Along a path in an eco-park by the beach, we also present eleven instructions from artists featured in previous editions of (re)connecting.earth — Alexandre Joly, Andreas Greiner & Takafumi Tsukamoto, Carmen Perrin, Caroline Bachmann, Eli Cortiñas, Fabian Knecht, Marie Griesmar, Monica Ursina Jäger, Raul Walch, Seba Calfuqueo, and Zheng Bo — under the collective Art-Werk × (re)connecting.earth. These instruction-based artworks invite visitors to engage with their surroundings through simple gestures, reflections, or actions rooted in ecological awareness.
Three newly commissioned instruction-artworks, produced through the Busan Biennale, complete this selection and integrate into the growing corpus of (re)connecting.earth: contributions by OMIJA, Mathias Kessler, Ahmed Civelek, and Hyeong-Seob Cho.

Each project is more than site-responsive; it invites the public into a sensory and cognitive relationship with the coastal ecosystem, encouraging attentiveness and cohabitation. One of the intentions of both Keumhwa and myself was to highlight the landscape—at times in its picturesque dimension, at other times through a critical lens focused on urbanization and industrial pollution. The contribution of Wonkyo Choi, another Busan-based artist we met during our first stay, reveals this dual perspective. Using mirrors, she shows the beauty of the landscape and the reflection of the viewer on one side; on the other side of her sculptures, she presents close-up photographs taken in the nearby industrial zone, hidden behind the hills.

The technical challenges of new productions and public art

Many works involve ambitious new productions and significant logistical complexity. Seba Calfuqueo, for instance, develops Mareas, a series of monumental photographic prints of queer Indigenous bodies floating directly on the sea. Secured to modular floating platforms engineered with the help of marine technicians, the images shift with the water — invoking questions of resistance, visibility, and fluid identity.
Mathias Kessler and Ahmet Civelek create Making Something Out of Nothing, a massive carpet woven from plastic waste collected from Dadaepo and surrounding beaches. Production requires setting up a temporary on-site workshop with ten local workers who manually cut and weave the plastic into a complex geometric tapestry. This labor-intensive process becomes an integral part of the work, emphasizing transformation through collective effort and the revaluation of discarded materials.
Anna Anderegg, working closely with a group of older women from the Dadaepo neighborhood, choreographs Silver Boom, a series of public performances along the shoreline. Dressed in shimmering silver costumes, the performers move slowly between two subway stations and the beach, asserting their presence and vitality against an ageist and rapidly modernizing urban backdrop.
A particularly enriching experience unfolds in the collaboration with Olaf Holzapfel, whose project develops through close partnership with a local carpenter who speaks only Korean. This linguistic barrier reveals the deeper challenge of translating artisanal knowledge across cultures. Through shared gestures and demonstrations, they develop mutual understanding — an exchange of techniques more tactile than verbal. The process becomes a living dialogue between craftsmanship and contemporary art, highlighting how embodied knowledge can bridge linguistic gaps.
Seeing the completed structure, built from bamboo and rice straw, comes as a beautiful surprise. One visitor tells a member of our team that the work reminds her of childhood memories—of sitting by a similar bamboo-framed window and once meeting a mouse there. Such encounters make visible the emotional and sensory bridges that art can build between memory and material.

Now that the exhibition is open, Dadaepo Beach becomes a living laboratory where artworks, citizens, and natural elements coexist in constant interaction. Workshops led by Antje Majewski, together with students from the local art academy, provide moments of shared learning — exploring how art can serve as a site of collective reflection and ecological sensitivity.
Each project functions as a node in a larger network of relationships — between water and land, the local and the planetary, the human and the more-than-human. What remains after the festival is not only a series of images or artefacts, but the relationships built in the process: between artists and artisans, curators and communities, visitors and the environment.
This edition of the Sea Art Festival reaffirms for me that curating can be a form of collective inquiry—capable of uncovering what lies beneath the surface, whether in the sand, in the sea, or in the structures of our society. These experiences inform the next chapters of art-werk and (re)connecting.earth. They remind me that curating today means learning to experiment with collaboration, exchange, and shared responsibility. Our task is to emphasize what connects rather than divides us, and to ensure that our cultural work continues to protect and defend the commons we all depend on.