local

Since the 1990s, globalization has intensified in Korean society, spreading as a movement that preserves local identity while embracing cultural diversity. Coupled with local government activities and support policies, this shift influenced the emergence of numerous city-based biennales throughout the country. Early Korean biennales emphasized the local as a counterpoint to the global; however, as definitions of locality grew increasingly ambiguous due to changes in the contemporary media landscape as well as the formal characteristics of contemporary art, the relationship between the local and the global began to be understood as cyclical and reciprocal. In Towards a New Locality: Biennials and Global Art (2005), curator and critic Hou Hanru asserts that in the contemporary era, locality emerges as “the process is automatically one of breaking down and reestablishing territorial borders as well as cultural boundaries at large, whether they have been recently politically determined or historically granted.” A key focus and a dilemma for SMB is the exchange of practices and discourses that simultaneously represent a specific region while also engaging in global discourse.