Titled Undercurrents: Waves Walking on the Water, the 2025 edition of the Sea Art Festival is led by co-artistic directors, Keumhwa Kim and Bernard Vienat, who were selected after an international open call. Keumhwa Kim currently works between Korea and Germany. As the founder and director of Keum Art Projects, she focuses on integrating art within nontraditional spaces from a post-Anthropocene perspective. Vienat serves as a board member on art4biodiversity. In 2012 he founded art-werk, a nonprofit association aimed at promoting art dedicated to contemporary social and environmental issues, and since 2021 he has been leading an art and urban nature biennial called (re)connecting.earth that has toured various European cities over the last four years. ArtReview caught up with Keumhwa Kim and Bernard Vienat to find out what this year’s programme is all about.
ArtReview What is the Sea Art Festival?
Keumhwa Kim It has a long tradition as an outdoor exhibition, mostly led by local artists and local curators. For the past six years it’s had a more international focus, with curators being selected via an open call. The main focus of the biennial is always the beach, so our approach is to treat it as an outdoor exhibition, mostly focused on installations and sculptures. The biennial tends to alternate between locations at Dadaepo Beach and Songdo, and for this year’s edition it returns to Dadaepo.
Bernard Vienat For me, this setting is an opportunity to have something really accessible to the commons – both to the people of Busan and to international visitors. It’s a good complement to the Busan Biennale [which is largely set indoors]. In order to reach these audiences we need to offer diverse points of entry. That makes it, for both curators and artists, at once a challenge and an opportunity: a chance to seek out different languages for different contexts.
One essential aspect of this context is that the art needs to be in dialogue with nature. It’s important that the artwork is not something that is damaging the landscape, but more a kind of tool to reach another level of awareness of that landscape.
The second essential factor is participation: that the exhibition is not something that you are forced to do, but something you are invited to engage with through a programme. This is something that starts even before the opening, through working with the festival team, with the artists, through workshops where people are invited to participate and to build the artworks.
The Sea Art Festival was established in 1987 within the framework of the Seoul Olympic Games to be held the following year. It takes place on the beaches surrounding the port city of Busan. It is notable for its engagement with the local environment and environmental issues more generally, as well as with local communities. Busan is Korea’s second largest city, after Seoul. It is the sixth-largest container port in the world.
KK I think compared to the Busan Biennale we are a bit freer of institutional framing and thus closer to the audience. We can focus more closely on the sensory experiences we offer a passerby without having to cater to museum visitors. We are really collaborating with local communities to make this happen on their seashores.
AR Can you talk some more about how that collaboration happens?
KK Our focus in this year’s edition is to recover and rebuild invisible entities and invisible structures in the area. It means our collaboration is also with scientists, such as paleontologists, bioacoustic researchers and meteorologists. They are people who are often hidden within the social structure of Busan, so this helps bring them more into the spotlight. This is also our focus: to bring out these kinds of undercurrents, not only in ecological terms, but also as social structures. How can we bring these invisible agencies to the surface?
AR What role does the sea itself play in the project?
KK The sea is not only the physical space. I think of the undercurrents as the kind of metabolic and invisible forces that shape our society, our awareness about the relationship with human and nonhuman agents. Also, that these are entangled within the modernisation process, I think, is very important for us and the project, because Dadaepo Beach has a very specific ideological transformation as the delta between the Nakdong River and the sea, downriver from an industrial site. This is an undercurrent.
BV All the works are site-specific. There is something special in producing for this context of Dadaepo, discovering the sites and then making the work. Diana Lelonek, for instance, is now onsite shooting photographs in dialogue with local scientists. She is thinking about the sea as something in constant evolution, as a friend and neighbour, but also something endangered, which continues a theme from photographs that she made in Geneva and Kiel.
I think the sea is something inspiring for the artists who are coming to Dadaepo, whether Plastique Fantastique or Seba Calfuqueo, who is taking photographs of the sea in Chile in relationship to a form of spirituality that developed in both regions.
The Busan Biennale is an international exhibition held on even-numbered years. From 1996 to 2011 the Sea Art Festival was integrated into the Busan Biennale, before being realised as a separate event once more. It continues to be organised by the Busan Biennale Organising Committee and Busan Metropolitan City. The artistic directors for the 2026 Busan Biennale will be Amal Khalaf and Evelyn Simons.
Dadaepo Beach is formed of sands deposited by the Nakdonggang River. It features shallow waters and is the site at which the river meets the South Sea. It is home to a coastal park and eco-exploration route leading to a unique marshland habitat.
KK It’s important for us also to explore what local artists in Busan are doing. What is their ecological awareness about landscape and their reactions to the site? We have three local artists: two are living and working in Busan, and one is originally from Busan, but is working in Berlin. There were a lot layers that can be rediscovered through their histories with the area. This complements the international artists, whose focus is very engaged with ecological awareness and postanthropocentric perspectives.
AR Could you just go a bit more into the title, Undercurrents: Waves Walking on the Water? There are different ways of reading the English title, is the same true in the Korean version of the title?
KK ‘Undercurrents’ itself was not easy to translate directly into Korean: it has an ambivalent denotation in English – something hidden, a potential that is also unpredictable. We struggled to find a corresponding title in Korean.
We decided to be more poetic with the subtitle, talking about who is making these undercurrents, who is making these permanent rhythms and movement. We tried to portray this kind of interplay on the surface, beyond the surface and beneath the surface of what is happening, and how these might come together in these 22 artists’ positions.
BV ‘Undercurrents’ has meanings that can be both ecological and social. In all big cities there are people who may not be visible, and we hope to pay attention to this relationship between the visible and the nonvisible. These undercurrents, those waves walking, are also sometimes waves of capital. You have capitalism trying to eat the beach in Dadaepo, literally: there were several plans for Dadaepo first as a harbour and then as an industrial area, and now there is a plan for building a hotel. We see that the undercurrent is also some things that are nonvisible, like gentrification. One artist in the festival, Hyeong-seob Cho, is making an artwork responding to this issue, a site-specific intervention in the incinerator building on the bay in which the hotel is to be built. We’ve also organised a panel with local journalists and local activists who are really fighting for the commons and fighting for that beach. The undercurrent can be the connection between the nonhuman and the human, but also a connection with what we can see and what is unseen but really present.
Sea Art Festival 2025, Undercurrents: Waves Walking on the Water, takes place 27 September – 2 November, Dadaepo Beach, Busan
This interview features in the ArtReview Korea Supplement, a special publication celebrating contemporary Korean art, supported by Korea Arts Management Service and available with the September 2025 issue of ArtReview
