SPACE July 2025 (No. 692)
Audience listening to Franco Mancuso’s presentation at the forum. Image courtesy of Arts Council Korea / ©Choi Jinbo
On the afternoon of the 9th of May, when the Korean Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale officially opened, a commemorative forum marking the 30th anniversary of the Pavilion’s establishment was held at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, hosted by Arts Council Korea. As a venue long cherished for laying on the Korean Pavilion’s official dinners, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, remodeled by the 20th-century Venetian master architect, Carlo Scarpa, provided a deeply meaningful backdrop to this collective reflection on the Pavilion’s legacy.
Entitled ‘Vision & Legacy: 30 Years of the Korean Pavilion’, the forum was moderated by Choon Choi (professor, Seoul National University), and opened with congratulatory remarks from Song Si Kyeong (director general of the secretariat, Arts Council Korea) and Sebastiano Costalonga (councillor for trade and productive activities, Venice City).
Representing CAC, Chung Dahyoung (co-director, CAC) delivered the keynote presentation, outlining the curatorial ambitions behind the exhibition ‘Little Toad Little Toad: Unbuilding Pavilion’ and offered a vision of the future Korean Pavilion. Chung explained that, in preparing for the 30th anniversary, they surveyed a wide variety of artworks and ideas that had been situated between the Pavilion’s walls. This led them to reimagine this space not as a ‘neutral monument’ but as a ‘living entity’ composed of layered time—an idea that found expression in the exhibition. Furthermore, by visually striking through the ‘COREA’ sign in front of the Pavilion, they proposed a dissolution of the North–South division and envisioned a new Korean Pavilion as a borderless, shared platform within the Giardini.
Reception dinner marking the opening of t...
