Somewhere Over the Yellow Sea
August 30–October 31, 2025
Main Conference Hall, 1F, Mokpo Literature Hall
Duration: August 30–October 31, 2025 / Venues: Haenam, Jindo, Mokpo / Artistic Director: Yun Cheagab / Curator: Hur Yurim.
Biennale overview
The 2025 Jeonnam International Sumuk Biennale has successfully opened under the theme Neighbors of Civilization–Somewhere Over the Yellow Sea. As the world’s only international biennale devoted to “sumuk” (ink-and-water painting aesthetics), it seeks to situate East Asian pictorial traditions within the contemporary global art discourse.
While more than 200 biennales exist worldwide, Jeonnam is unique in its commitment to East Asian painting aesthetics. By foregrounding sumuk as an epistemic and artistic category distinct from Western modernism, the Biennale not only preserves but also redefines its tradition, positioning itself as a counter-hegemonic platform and a balancer of world civilizations.
A Trumpet-Shaped Journey Through Time
Haenam–Roots of Namdo Sumuk
Gosan Yun Seon-do Museum: Anchored by canonical works such as Self-Portrait by Gongjae Yun Du-seo and Inwangjesaekdo by Gyeomjae Jeong Seon, this section situates Namdo as a cradle of literati painting and philosophy.
Land’s End Pilgrimage Literature Museum: A contemporary homage to Yun Du-seo by six artists from France, China, Japan, and Korea, reinterpreting early modern subjectivity through new media and expanded painting.
Jindo–Tradition’s Inheritance and Development
Namdo Traditional Art Museum: Featuring five modern masters—Lee Ungno, Park Saeng-kwang, Suh Se-ok, Song Su-nam, Hwang Chang-bae—who advanced the Korean sumuk movement while commemorating Sochi’s legacy.
Sojeon Art Museum: A genealogical exhibition of Korean calligraphy from Chusa Kim Jeong-hui to Sojeon Son Jae-hyeong, tracing the epistemological continuum of seohwa ilche (the unity of calligraphy and painting).
Mokpo–Global Expansion and Fusion
Mokpo Culture & Arts Center & Indoor Gymnasium: Presenting 61 artists from 20 countries, this section becomes a “sumuk factory” where traditional materials and digital media collide, exploring contemporaneity and multi-temporality in the age of AI.
Core concepts
Redefinition of Sumuk
Sumuk is not limited to monochrome ink but broadly denotes painting with water-soluble pigments. This definition encompasses ink-and-wash and colored painting, continuing the East Asian tradition of unity between poetry, calligraphy, and painting (siseohwa ilchi), and reviving the intellectual model of the literati painter in a contemporary key.
Yellow Sea Civilization Theory
The Biennale frames Sumuk as a cultural product of the Yellow Sea as a maritime zone of exchange, rather than as a continental tradition bound to nation or empire. This perspective resists both Sinocentric continentalism and Occidentalist paradigms, opening a critical horizon where Asia itself becomes “the Other” to be interrogated.
Innovation of Tradition and Expansion of Materials
The Biennale emphasizes Sumuk’s adaptability to contemporary conditions—digital media, VR/AR, and AI. Through such expansions, it demonstrates that sumuk is not a static heritage but a living methodology that interrogates temporality, embodiment, and perception.
Special program: artist talk
Theme: Silent Language, Wandering Memory, and Diaspora. Date: Saturday, August 30, 2025. Venue: Mokpo Literature Museum, 1F Conference Room. Artist: Parastou Forouhar (Iran-German). Researcher: Prof. Ha-Young Joo (Chonnam National University, Department of Fine Arts).
The artist talk brought together Parastou Forouhar and art historian Ha-Young Joo to explore how sumuk discourse intersects with memory, trauma, and diasporic existence. Forouhar—shaped by her personal history of exile and the violent loss of her dissident parents in post-revolutionary Iran—has developed a body of work that transforms silence into a visual and spatial language. Her practice engages painting, drawing, installation, and text, foregrounding the ambiguity between beauty and violence, ornament and oppression, private memory and public history.
Key discussions
Memory and Archive: Documentation (1999– )
Forouhar’s installation Documentation exposes her correspondence with state institutions regarding her parents’ assassination, inviting viewers to copy and carry fragments away. This participatory archive destabilizes the boundary between private grief and collective history. Drawing on Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory, Forouhar emphasized that memory is never fixed but continuously reconfigured—a “living practice” resisting silence and closure. The act of re-narrating fragments sustains memory’s vulnerability, allowing loss to coexist with the possibility of transformation.
Ornament and Violence: My Name is Red, My Name is Green III
This digital drawing subverts traditional Persian ornament by embedding narratives of trauma and political oppression within seductive decorative surfaces. Forouhar explained her intent to maintain ambiguity—allowing beauty and brutality to coexist without canceling each other. Viewers are first drawn in by refinement, only to encounter the violence beneath. This tension between pleasure and pain reflects the contradictions of Iranian lived experience, situating ornament as both cultural heritage and critical tool.
Butterflies as Ambivalent Metaphor: Papillon Collection (2009– )
In Papillon Collection, butterflies—at once delicate and agonizing—embody fragility, resilience, mourning, and hope. Rooted in the Iranian Green Movement (2009), where butterflies became emblems of protest and repression, the motif connects personal memory (her mother’s name, Parvaneh, meaning butterfly) to broader struggles against authoritarian violence. Forouhar described the butterfly as a bearer of contradictions: life and death, admiration and grief, vulnerability and endurance.
Decoration and Power Structures
Forouhar reiterated her position that “ornaments resemble totalitarian regimes” (The Guardian, 2017). Repetition and enforced harmony function as mechanisms of control. By embedding violent narratives within ornamental systems, she exposes how beauty can conceal brutality and how order can suppress difference. The work thereby situates itself at the intersection of Islamic decorative heritage and contemporary critical art, transforming tradition into a form of resistance.
Written Room (1995– )
The immersive installation Written Room fills white gallery walls with Persian calligraphy, creating an environment of partial legibility. Forouhar stressed that the deliberate loss of readability is not about exclusion but about inviting reflection. Ambiguity opens a space for viewers to dwell in the unfamiliar, echoing her diasporic condition as both insider and outsider. Each site-specific realization—whether in Germany, Italy, Greece, or now Korea—absorbs new cultural contexts, producing shifting layers of meaning.
Contemporary Relevance: Refugees and Global Displacement
Forouhar’s recent works address humanitarian crises beyond her personal exile. Wars in the Middle East and the global refugee crisis inform her practice, transforming art into a space where statistics and headlines become palpable human experiences. To the Biennale audience, she offered a final reflection: art should be “a place of encounter” where we open ourselves to the wounds of others, cultivating empathy that resists indifference in the face of suffering.
The talk illuminated how Forouhar’s practice resonates with the Biennale’s theme of Neighbors of Civilization. Her works situate diasporic memory, ornament, and political trauma within a broader discourse on sumuk—as a medium that is not limited to brush and ink but expanded into conceptual, participatory, and immersive forms. By rethinking silence, wandering memory, and diaspora, the program underscored how sumuk can articulate not only East Asian aesthetics but also universal conditions of displacement, vulnerability, and resilience in the 21st century.
Significance of the biennale
The Jeonnam International Sumuk Biennale confronts the historical marginalization of East Asian ink painters within global biennale circuits, such as those in Venice or Documenta. By institutionalizing an international forum dedicated to East Asian aesthetics, it registers sumuk as a constitutive element of universal human civilization.
This Biennale aspires not only to showcase artworks but also to articulate a new civilizational grammar—one that decenters Western paradigms and highlights Asia’s polycentric contributions. Through its layered approach—roots (Haenam), trunk (Jindo), and global resonance (Mokpo)—it exemplifies how tradition, modernity, and technology intersect in reshaping the visual culture of the 21st century.
From roots to resonance, Sumuk becomes a grammar of world civilization.
