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By Lisa Wong Macabasco
What fragrances capture a nation’s past? Artist Koo Jeong A attempted to answer this question at the Korean Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale.
The result, “Odorama Cities”, an olfactory portrait of the Korean Peninsula distilled from some six hundred olfactory memories of Koreans and those linked to it, adding residents, visitors, adoptees and expatriates like Koo himself (who has lived in Europe since 1991). This set of memories, presented in a public call last summer, was then classified through Koo into 17 distinct olfactory concepts that 14 perfumers from France, China, Singapore, Japan, Ireland and South Korea translated into actual fragrances.
Some fragrances are encouraged through nature, capturing, for example, the salty sea air of the peninsula, as well as the familiar mist, red pines (Korea’s national tree), and spring-blooming magnolias and azaleas. Other aromas of the pavilion are based on food, as befits a country whose cuisine has become world-famous in recent years: one evokes jang-dok-dae, the classic clay pots used for the fermentation of kimchi, with elements of soybean paste and chili paste, while another recreates the tantalizing smell of cooked rice. with sesame oil and soy sauce, a Korean standard.
The most intriguing smells are ingrained in modern Korean life. The smell of Seoul, for example, the damp, earthy smell of mold (inspired by the city’s rainy months), while the resinoid of labdanum emits sweat and alleyways. Old-fashioned electronics, composed of black pepper, metallic tunings, and incense, is like opening a broken radio, evoking worn plastic, metal, burnt rubber, and dust. And the Grandparents’ House, actually a harsh olfactory reminiscence all over the world, is evoked through notes of moldy wood and old fabrics.
All those scents and more blend freely thanks to the egg-shaped diffusers hidden around the Korean pavilion, a modest two-piece design made of metal and glass overlooking the Venetian lagoon and adorned this year with a single low ring made of Möbius wood that serves as a bench. As you pass through the open area with parquet floors, you can almost smell an express smell.
A set of 17 other olfactory concepts are freely combined in the Korean pavilion, with its subtle decoration.
It’s intentional, Koo tells me inside the pavilion, with his small body perched in the ring. “It’s about crossing borders and talking about a country in an inclusive and broad way,” they say in a voice slightly above a whisper. “In general, all the national pavilions here are very divided. With this, I hope to go beyond nations and borders into a not unusual future. I even hope one day for a transnational pavilion at the Biennale; I’d gladly commission that.
Site-specific installations that interact with the senses and question beliefs and the ephemeral are some of the artist’s signatures. “Koo’s practice is to make the invisible visible,” says Seolhui Lee, who curated the pavilion with fellow Danish curator Jacob Fabricius. It involves combining architectural elements with texts, drawings, paintings, sculptures, films and installations, as well as invisible elements such as temperature and sound.
And of course the perfume. The Seoul-born artist (and recent model for Loewe’s crusade) has been working with scents and reminiscences since the early days of her three-decade career. In 1996’s Pullover’s Armoir, they strategically placed mothballs in their Paris studio, referencing the smell of their grandmother’s house. closet, as an exploration of reminiscence. In 2011, Before the Rain, a perfume meant to capture the humid air of an Asian village before rain filled an empty New York gallery. And at London’s Charing Cross station in 2016, Odorama gestured to the old, noisy bustle of a disused platform with smell, sweetness and shade.
After all, smell is more like memories and feelings than any other sense. “From birth, perfumes identify a connection with our parents, then attract us to other people and arouse our curiosity,” the curators note in the exhibition catalogue. “Although underrated, fragrances play an important role because they bring comfort and evoke subconscious feelings. “
The serenity of the Korean pavilion places direct emphasis on the sense of smell.
The diffusers hidden around the canopy diffuse the other olfactory concepts.
In ÀVENISE, the serenity of the pavilion places a direct emphasis on the sense of smell, which is presented as a kind of balm after a series of pavilions full of overly stimulating works that vie for audiovisual attention.
And the ointments are the collection of the new Good Looks Logo Nonfiction lifestyle, which has spearheaded the creation of all the fragrances in the pavilion. The Seoul-based company introduced fragrance-based frame care in 2019, and it’s now considered a component of the new wave of K-good looks, with three warmly minimalist retail outlets in the Korean capital. There are many more resellers in Tokyo and Hong Kong, and a small but developing number of stores in Europe and the rest of the world. United States.
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Non-fiction was suitable to accompany the pavilion in this task as the logo “strives to infuse emotion and inspiration into life through exclusive narratives and fragrances,” according to founder Haeyoung Cha. “Koo is famous for majestically exploring the poetics of life, and ‘Odorama Cities’ is an encouraging chronicle of the peninsula’s history and a reminder of Korea’s many olfactory stories.
The smaller adjacent room of the pavilion houses a single glow-in-the-dark pedestal with a bronze sculpture, a playful figure wielding a peace sign captured in the middle of the jump. (Levitation is a theme in Koo’s work; see the luminous image (the dark skateparks that have been built in cities around the world over the past 12 years. )Every two minutes, the figure, which, like Möbius’s ring, represents infinity, another of Koo’s preoccupations, emits a vapor from his nostrils. with some other smell.
It’s called Odorama Cities Eau de Parfum, created by legendary perfumer Dominique Ropion, mastermind of some of the world’s most iconic fragrances. Each of the main notes of Odorama Cities (sandalwood, mugwort, frankincense, and tuberose) reflects olfactory memories of decades after the Korean War, when the country went from an agrarian country to an industrialized and, in the end, highly urbanized country. Sandalwood, for example, comes from the sea, forests, and mountains of Korea, which is talked about in many memoirs from the 1960s; The incense, with its accords of ambergris, aldehyde and asphalt, evokes the bloodless air of the subway and the engines humming in the afternoon air, correlating with the most recent memories, since 2010.
The new Odorama Cities non-fiction eau de parfum
Master Perfumer Dominique Ropion
Surprisingly, Ropion has never visited Corea. Me would love to go, of course,” the elegant French nose tells me on the terrace of Palazzo Gritti, soaking up the surrounding aromas of the stinky Grand Canal, the overly fragrant art world’s elite, and our refreshing espressos.
Prior to this project, he knew little about the country and its history, although he is a fan of the darkness and cynicism of Korean cinema and is enthusiastic about the film Parasite. ” And I know Koreans love fragrances,” Ropion adds. The Korean fragrance market has exploded in the last six years, especially among the younger generations. (In the catalogue, the critic Young June Lee writes an interesting essay about how Korea’s old smells—those of industry, bathrooms, hospitals, and automobiles—have been transformed. regulated and suppressed over the past three decades. )
Unnoticed, Ropion gained photographs of the country and a bouquet of its usual smells: wood, incense, rice, spices, bath scents, scents of its volcanoes and flowers, such as magnolias. “From there,” he says, “I had to believe in a country. In his four-decade career, he had never had such a brief tenure: “It’s the first time I’ve traveled to a country only by smell. “
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Ropion also collaborated on the pavilion’s olfactory concepts, taking it further into uncharted territory. “As a perfumer, my intention is to create anything that smells elegant and can be worn,” he says with a smile. However, with the Fish Market fragrance, made from a seaweed absolute and fish salt accords,” the logo read: “It smells so good, you want to stink more!That never happens.
Creating an advertising fragrance distilled from 16 unbearable smells about a country I had never set foot in was not an undeniable task. But for Ropion, the final arbiters of his good luck will be those whose memories have been infused into the fragrance (which is now “When the Korean team felt what he had done, they were very moved,” he said. “To them, it means something. And that’s the whole point of the fragrance: a fragrance that touches other people very deeply.
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