The Cheongju Craft Biennale 2025: Recrafting Tomorrow is live, presenting uplifting, thoughtful, soulful, and just plain jaw-dropping craft until the 2nd of November. The Competition Exhibition is incredible, and peppered with an eye-bulging array of craft-forms. The Main Exhibition (of which myself, Jacky Cheng, the Tjanpi Desert Weavers and Susie Vickery are all a part) is immense and amazing, and the Thai installation and Hyundai Special international exhibition are each filled with hair-pricking-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck moments of beauty, pathos and sheer exuberance.
Quick story: Last September IOTA: 24 co-curator and World Craft Council Australia President, Jude van der Merwe, convinced the Artistic Director Jaeyoung Kang and Chief Curator Gayoung Oh of the Cheongju Craft Biennale into a whistle-stop tour of Perth during the IOTA conference, direct from a visit to Venice (Perth being a renowned transfer hub in the Asia Pacific region…) In a famously slow week the pair landed at the IOTA Conference after a bunch of local artists had just finished their Pecha Kucha talks. Knowing her colleagues would have appreciated seeing these, Jude pulled the speakers aside and asked them to present an encore. Thus we promptly found our presentations on our own laptops and ipads or quickly sent them to the one available, and re-presented our 6 minute talks in the large common space outside the lecture spaces where other presentations were still being made.
In town to deliver a presentation at the conference that week (and, incidentally, staying with me) was Dr Marian Hosking, the famed Australian jeweller, silversmith and lecturer (and ADC Living Treasure), who oversaw my MFA studies at Monash University. Marian was herself exhibited in the Invitational Exhibition as part of The Breath of Nature: Cheongju Craft Biennale 2001. She also had a solo exhibition at Gana Art Centre in Insa-dong, Seoul in 2006. She encouraged me (and everyone in the jewellery studio at Monash) to enter the Cheongju Craft Competition, which I did in 2009, and again in 2011. That year to the shock and delight of both of us, I won a gold prize, one of four handed out that year. Knowing how highly Marian spoke of her trips, I booked to go to Cheongju to witness the Biennale opening first-hand. Suffice to say, time has made the whole Biennale and opening a lot slicker, though the Opening Ceremony is just as grand in scope and run-time. But back to IOTA:24…
Jude made a call after Marian and I had exited the Curtin campus that afternoon, (I was in my studio to prepare for the workshop I was leading at the conference the following day) asking if I would be able to open my studio to the Cheongju team in the following days. I only had one full day to go before I was jetting to Thailand for another IOTA opening, so the following evening they came through and saw my studio and works, including rapidlyclosingwindow…#1 that was newly finished but still hanging on a support on my wall (one of the two works that are now on show in the Cheongju Craft Biennale Main Exhibition). In a full-circle moment, Marian was on hand to meet Jaeyoung and Gayoung as they toured my studio, after which we all went to dinner along with Jude and fellow IOTA committee member Heli Donaldson. (It was this evening that Heli also committed to ‘carrying my bags’ in Cheongju this year. She was indeed there, giving me someone to eat and hang out with over the course of the week.)
While the emails with paperwork took a little while to come through, it was that night I knew my works would be heading to South Korea once again, this time to be in the main exhibition. (Though in South Korean tradition, I was also reminded that night that I had not yet won the grand prize at the competition, implying that I should keep striving. Dutifully, I entered the competition again this year, and was not selected. C’est la vie! It was gratifying that excellent German jewellery artist, Julia Obermaier, took out the gold!) The knowledge that I would be an even bigger part of what I had witnessed in 2011 buoyed me hugely in the coming weeks, through an intensely packed (yet hugely heart-filling and rewarding) schedule of IOTA and JMGA-WA Conference events.
While once again the program in Cheongju was stacked high, this time I got to relax and witness everything with less naive incredulity and a little more understanding. The shows are veritable extravaganzas, and the opening ceremony still an over 90 minute bonanza of dance, speeches, prize-giving, more speeches, symbolism and ceremony. That has not changed (the prize-giving ceremony is out in the open during a 200-odd person standing dinner, and the main ceremony lacked the previous video message from the president and fly-over from the military!!) though the understanding of South Korea in the word surely has, and this awareness has echoed back. We heard many mentions of K-Pop, and how analogous world take-overs of K-Culture and K-Craft are similarly on the horizon. Time will tell.
What I can say is an echo Kevin Murray’s observation made to me during our week in South Korea. To paraphrase, he keeps going back to Cheongju because the show is just so incredible. And for an exhibition that started in an old tobacco factory (now fully renovated with exhibition spaces, restaurants, coffee shops, clothing, gift and souvenir stores and on the higher floors artist studios and offices,) to be consistently showcasing the best the craft world has to offer, over more than 25 years with rarely a curator repeated, that is a superlative feat.
Suffice to say, after only my second visit, I can’t wait to go back either.
Melissa (and Jacky Cheng and Susie Vickery) attended the Cheongju Craft Biennale with the assistance of the State Government of Western Australia.
