Korean Pavilion
The 60th International Art Exhibition
– La Biennale di Venezia
Curated by Seolhui Lee & Jacob Fabricius
April 20 – November 24, 2024

I remember the distinct smell that permeated my maternal grandparents' house during my childhood. It was an old general store in Singapore, and it had a unique blend of wooden structures and various household items, like it had been fermented at a certain emperature and humidity over time. The nostalgia of that scent resurfaced during my twenties when I encountered something similar on the wooden stairs of a temple in Korea. I wasn’t able to come across anything similar after that. It dawned on me that the scent was synonymous with wooden buildings.

I find it hard to really remember scents, but I can recall the places of these smells. The air is both dusty and dry, and humid by the river of Andong. Yellowed grasses mix with burnt clay and dirt roads. A whiff of time standing still, of tranquility and long-gone powers. It is quaint and a bit faded, like a lived-in open-air museum. In contrast to this, the air of the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan is heavy with moisture, a mix of marshy ocean, muddy, dense, and rotting, with sharp notes from the fumes of the highway. It gets me thinking of the future and then of the past.

Behind our house, there were a few persimmon trees, and every year my grandfather would pick persimmons and braid them to dry. Being a picky eater, I could only have persimmons after finishing my rice, and I distinctly remember the sweet, fragrant smell of persimmons wafting into my nose amidst the scent of cooked rice. When I visited my maternal grandfather's empty house after he passed away, the fresh scent of persimmons evoked strong emotions within me. Now, the aroma of persimmons fills me with nostalgia.

The rich aroma of roasted soybean powder. Memory of my grandmother who used to mix up well-cooked rice with roasted soybean power to feed her granddaughter who had small appetite.

Unlike in South Korea, toilets in North Korea are usually installed outside of buildings or in yards. The odor of poop would often permeate my house and spread throughout the yard, even though the toilet door was firmly shut. I still have a vivid memory of using newspapers to clean myself, as I didn't have toilet paper.

Daebudo Island was experiencing a fire just before I arrived, leaving a landscape with black petrified trees, burned hay and smoke smell. After 3 days there, the Fukushima nuclear accident happened, affecting all world, but by being so close it engendered a strong feeling of fear that you could smell in the air. This is also when I encountered the shaman Sul-Hwa Kim, who later invited me to become her "shaman daughter". I engaged an initiatory dialogue with her that opened up many “gates”: from the professional to the intimate sphere. Intense time period during which I also met a beautiful lover who was wearing a unisex perfume created by Mark Buxton. I very much loved this flagrance and its original concept behind the scent: of an imagery flower, an atypical, incandescent energizing rose, «the fragrance of a flower that reminds each person of a different smell but it is majestically indefinable». I am wearing it since then and still find it somehow magical. [Also, very strong delicious food scent (kimchi, bibimbap, stir-fried octopus and all seafood dishes) and the Busan fish market.]

Even now, in February and March, when I left my parents' arms for the first time and arrived in an unfamiliar land to start college, I can still smell it. It's the aroma of rainy, damp air, the kind of scent that, when you encounter something similar later in life, reminds you of your youthful exuberance and makes you feel good, but it also evokes a curiously unfamiliar and lonely grayness.

The smell of early morning air, plus phytoncides, as I walk home from the last ride of the subway is very relaxing and calming. I smell this all the time, usually when I'm tired after a day’s work or when I've had a few drinks and am tired, and I love the joy of being almost home and the calmness of the moment.

For a moment in my youth, I lived in a small town in Canada. As the sun began to set and sunset started, the whole neighborhood emanated the scent of firewood, giving me a complete sense of comfort and happiness. Every night before dinnertime, under the setting sun, I would ride my bike with my family in the neighborhood, one round around, absorbing the scent on my body. I have a beautiful and fond memory of when the sun had completely set. We would be in the backyard, sitting in a circle, watching the stars, and we lit a firewood fire.

In the middle of August, I accompanied an associate on a field trip to Anseong. I was there as a photographer. After lunch, we arrived at the small village, where residents had just finished weeding their rice fields and pepper fields and were relaxing under the jeongja. We talked and talked all while the air pressure was building up, threatening to suffocate us. As we were about to leave, the sky darkened and big droplets started to rain down. We made a run for the car. The pepper fields to the right stood there waving goodbye to us the whole way – not with their tender leaves but with their ripe organs. The combination of the stifling summer heat and the moistened atmosphere suffused the air with the scent of ripe chilis: a heady combination of sweet and spicy but also mustiness from the inundated soil below. It reminded me of the time I broke the seal on a bag of dried chilis that had accidentally sat in the sun for too long, but the moist and earth added a bitterness I didn’t know I craved all along. Looking back, I wish I had stopped running to stick my head between the rows. If only for a moment.

The smell of the basement of an apartment (wet cement, similar to that of moist soil).

It feels damp. It was at sunset.

The sugary scent of candies.

It might not directly align with the question, but I have a memory of a smell that holds more significance than a mere scent. I recall the stench of rotten water from a neighborhood called Deokcheon Village in Anyang-si, Gyeonggi-do, where I lived for 19 years. Back then, numerous factory complexes surrounded my house, and the nearby river had a Class 5 rating, infamous for having the worst water quality in the country due to direct wastewater discharge. The water seemed uninhabitable, yet if you looked closely, you could spot red thread-like creatures squirming around. I also remember seeing deformed fish and frogs with bent backs occasionally. One day, I accidentally fell into the stream but was fortunate enough to be rescued by an old tire. My entire body reeked of rotten water, and although it wasn't pleasant, this smell memory from my childhood is something I still reminisce about occasionally.

I drank green tea and ate green tea cold noodles and ice cream at a seaside restaurant. When the fragrance of the green tea lingered, I walked to the beach and felt the fragrance mixed with the salty scent of the sea breeze. More than ten years have passed, but that peculiar scent still remains vivid. I can still recall holding a tiny crab in the palm of my hand, with each of its legs seemingly coated with pulsating molecules of scent.

On days when I arrived at kindergarten a little earlier than my classmates,I spent time playing with the few friends who were also early, surrounded by an array of educational toys and materials. As I waited for my friends, a familiar scent enveloped the classroom, its memory long forgotten. Last year, by chance, a similar fragrance found its way to me, instantly transporting me back to that cherished place in my mind.

I think Koreans have a weird relationship with rain, taking out umbrellas the very instant a drop falls from the sky. Nevertheless, my "Korean" memory is that of a rainy spring day in Budapest. I was walking down a windy street on a late afternoon, worrying about this and that, things now long forgotten. I was listening to music on my phone – a K-POP song called Thunderous playing in my earphones, and all of a sudden it starts raining. I could have hidden somewhere and I could have taken out my umbrella from my bag, but in that moment I felt energised and thrilled by all the sensations happening around me. The heavy raindrops hitting the dusty pavement, the wind carrying leaves and paper, and the thunder being louder than the music in my ears – I was afraid and I was ecstatic. The smells changed from one moment to another – from the smell of fresh rain on the pavement (dusty, oily, heavy, petroleum) to freshness (water, ozone, electricity, cold, fresh) and finally to wet (hair, skin, clothes, remains of my jasmine perfume, wet leaves and grass). The whole time the same song was playing in my ears, and although I didn't know much about the meaning of the lyrics (I didn't speak any Korean at the time), reading them after coming home somehow fit and completed my experience. I still find it amazing how I could feel and smell and experience the things from the song, while not having a clue about the lyrics. So this is why my Korean scent memory is that of rain and thunder.

The salty sea breeze in the moist and damp air that hits me at Busan station.

1. In my first trip to Busan in 2019, I didn't go to the shorelines, but only at the hillside at night. It was after rain in spring time. So the air of freshness from the hillside areas was very distinct, looking out at the Busan port area from afar. During the second trip in 2022 Autumn, my companion was driving around the hilly roads (not the expressways) of Busan in the morning with the car windows winded down, and caught lots of fresh air, mixed of trees and leafs etc. But when we reached the port area (Yeongdo-gu), the smells changes, nearby the port where tugboats docked, the scent is a mix of petrol fume, stale fishy smell; whereas at the different seaside (Gamji Haebyeon at Dongsam-dong), it was smell of saline seawater, seaweed... 2. I was staying on a rooftoop of a light commercial distribution center at Dongdaemun-gu in 2019, there were alot of clothing and tailors, seamstress, shoes retailers, distributors, so the smells of fresh ironing press, steam from clothing/washing when walking pass the clothing fabricators area and the DDM Shoes Market, was a mix of both, rubber and clothes. Another distinct experience is the smell of street food in Seoul (esp Gwangjang market nearby DDM) – I guess the higher concentration of people and movement enclosed under the roof, just intensifies that experience (not that we don't get such with other places). This is rather different as I visited Anseong to one of the studio of RiceBrewingSistersClub, which is besides farming area, the scent of soil and grass is something I dont get in downtown Seoul.

Memories of playing in the medicinal storage in a corner of my father's oriental medicine clinic.