The exhibition is inspired by “Crow’s Eye View,” a poem by the Korean architect-turned-poet Yi Sang (1910 -1937). In contrast to a bird’s eye view – a singular and universalizing perspective – the exhibition points to the impossibility of a cohesive grasp of not only the architecture of a divided Korea but the idea of architecture itself. Like uncharted patches of an irregular globe, a diverse ran
ge of work produced by architects, urbanists, poets and writers, artists, photographers and film-makers, curators and collectors forms a multiple set of research programmes, entry nodes, and points of view. They call attention to the urban and architectural phenomena of the planned and the informal, individual and collective, the heroic and the everyday. Intertwined yet in opposition, spilling over to each other, they reveal the way that a wide range of architectural interventions have reflected and shaped the life of the Korean Peninsula. The Korean Pavilion reveals the Korean Peninsula as both symptom and agent, both archetype and anomaly of the tumultuous global trajectory of the past 100 years.
