The theme for the 2009 Biennale, Outside the Box, proposes that craft be considered or approached as a composite whole, rather than as a series of fragmentary and contending disciplines. To think outside the box, as the phrase goes in the West, is to transcend spurious divisions through the human faculty of imagination. In newly-merged artistic and managerial discourses, ‘outside the box’ is where the indispensably ‘innovative’ is to be found. But it is also where a state of integration becomes attainable; where meetings become possible. As what is devised as a necessary means to an end, craft and innovation have ever been one and the same. By the same definition craft is integration; with nature, with others, with its collective self. It therefore has the power to unite and represent all human values, in the here and now. It is one of the chief absurdities of our times that the world should be facing unprecedented environmental, economic and humanitarian crises and at the same time find itself inundated with products and consumables. The position in relation to crafts, and the fate of crafts, is one essential aspect of this paradox. Contemporary attitudes to material culture: the idea of the self as project the creation of the authentic individual the arbitrariness of meaning; these have proceeded from the beginnings of modern consumerism in the eighteenth century, and from the development of Romanticism as an intellectual and emotional response.1 But to what vision of mankind does this proliferation of the inherently valueless testify in our information and technology age?

The category of ‘craft’ cannot be described in simple terms. Every process involved in its production can be assessed as a subject of inquiry, or as an object in itself. The Biennale reclaims in the colligation of ‘craft’ not only the products that are normally taken to define it, such as painting, sculpture, architecture, and design, but also music, dance, poetry, literature, theatre and film, and reinterprets these works collectively as the pursuits of homo faber, for whom they would not have been disjoined. Its particular aim is to encourage, display and explore artworks created in the desire for a universe in which those connections are re-established. The project requires, accordingly, that themes and subjects are open to individual worlds of experience, rather than experiences, and thereby to the binding framework of reference and meaning formed by a shared culture and consciousness; from cardinal themes and issues with which the instincts and ideals of the maker were once enmeshed - the expeditions of the mundane - to the primeval antecedent from which the greatest acts of creation have always derived. This is a search for meaning in a tortuous era. What of the late twentieth-century commodity-artifact, when the challenge to forge a new experiment in craft is made in the exhibition halls of the Biennale - and how will our delineation of homo faber compare with the emergence of his twenty-first century avatar?

Dr. Ihnbum Lee｜Director, 2009 Cheongju International Craft Biennale

1 Susan Pearce, Collecting in contemporary practice (London: SAGE, 1998) pp.180-181