Virtual Space and National Division: Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2014)

Abstract

Abstract How can a visual cultural object represent national division, especially its inherent complexity in spatiotemporal contestations brought by the regurgitating history of antagonistic separation? This article’s central object of analysis is a recent architecture exhibition that conjures what I call “a virtual space of Korean division”—an immersive space of embodiment where visitors can experience a shift in conceptual framework through exposure to the unforeseen relations outside their previously held notions about national division, which, for the Korean peninsula, began in 1945 and solidified in 1953. Titled Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula, the exhibition was housed in the Korean Pavilion for the occasion of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. As an exhibition that presents Korean modern architecture and urban space, Crow’s Eye View prompts an intervention into the history of Korean division, operating on the spatial fields of embodiment, displacement, and mediation. The visual and spatial analyses of the exhibition include the display tactics, the origin story of the Korean Pavilion in Venice, and the colonial poet Yi Sang’s 1934 visual poem Ogamdo (Crow’s eye view), an eponymous poem from which the curators acquire the exhibition’s conceptual identity. Proposing an alternative to the existing representational frameworks of nationalism and Cold War bipolarity, this article argues that Crow’s Eye View and its virtuality reconfigure national division as a precarious state of being in common despite differences—a state of contingent coexistence and not a unified oneness nor an oppositional separation. In so doing, the exhibition thrusts the spatiotemporality of the Cold War, and the post–Cold War era, into virtual movement.