Cheongju Craft Biennale'09: Outside the Box

The Theme : Outside the Box
The Main Pavilion Seminars organized for the 2009 Cheongju International Craft Biennale will focus on its course through the preceding ten years as we consider what changes are to come in the decade ahead.

Professor Ihnbum Lee of SangMyung University has been nominated by the committee as supervisor of the 2009 Biennale. Professor Lee began his career as the Curator of Seoul’s National Museum of Modern Art and has contributed continuously since the development of criticism, theory, education and practice in the milieu of Korean contemporary art. Korean arts and crafts have benefited particularly during his recent supervision of the Chiwoo Craft Museum in Seoul.

The title of the 2009 Cheongju Craft Biennale, 'Outside the Box,’ looks forward to the self-awakening of Arts and Crafts in a period of decline, disruption, and isolation from other sectors of the new global arena of art. It is the mission of the Biennale to restore the standing of arts and crafts in the world and re-define and establish its worth and potential.

A consideration of the whole range of disciplines that is art & crafts, and of the materials and methods that gave rise to them, is necessary to estimulate imaginative proposals for intercommunion with painting and sculpture architecture and literature; theatre and film; music and dance even horticulture and floriculture. This will be the basis of discourse for the many professionals attending the international seminar. As we have passed through the industrial and the post-industrial age, the sundering of man from nature has been correlative to the fragmentation of both life and art yet in the arts, all corners of the world may meet. We will set out to demonstrate the value and necessity of arts and crafts to all human life the political, the economic, the social, the cultural, and the espiritual. 

One of the most significant changes to the 2009 Biennale is that entry to our international competition will be open across all craft disciplines, techniques and materials. We would welcome a comprehensive range of submitted works.