In response to the 2018 Venice Biennale's “Freespace” theme, the Korean Pavilion exhibition, “Spectres of the State Avant-garde”, sheds light on a hidden narrative  of Korea's paradoxical pursuit of a utopian society through oppressive government policy. 

Curated by Seongtae Park, founding director of the Junglim Foundation in Seoul, the exhibition is an imagined archive that focuses on the contradictions embedded in the projects designed by the Korea Engineering Consultants Corp (KECC) — a technical consultancy for architecture and civil engineering that the government created in 1963. The KECC dominated Korea's architecture and construction industry, sometimes imitating architectural experiments from the West but mostly following the state's developmental agenda.

Four KECC projects from the late ’60s, which all served as nation-building propaganda, will be highlighted: the Expo Pavilion for the Osaka Expo 1970; the utopian Yeouido master plan; the Sewoon Arcades; and the Guro Industrial Exposition. 

“Despite KECC’s undisputed influence over Korea's subsequent urban paradigm that continues to this day, their stories remain as a blind spot in the architectural history of Korea. The vacuum of archival evidence has led to various historical assessments, ranging from adulation as the mythical pioneer of contemporary Korean architecture to resentful dismissal of their work as a Faustian bargain,” Curator Seongtae Park describes in a statement. 

“Its apparition still haunts the architectural imagination in Korea, and the 2018 Korean Pavilion is an attempt to dive into this historical void to meet face-to-face the ghost of KECC. By exorcising its contradictory legacies, we may discover, beneath the ashes of the State Avant-garde, clues for building new forms of civic space for the postdevelopmental and post-national society today,” Park continues.

“Spectres of the State Avant-garde” will open on May 24.