Kiwi stands out from screen

The Busan Biennale is one of the biggest art biennales in the world.

Held in Korea's second largest city, Busan, an Asian metropolis of over 5 million people, the biennale comprises three sections: the Sculpture Project in the city, the seaside sculpture on the beach and an internationally recognised Contemporary Art Exhibition.

The latter is in Busan's Metropolitan Museum - a huge 1980s building with almost more brown marble on the walls than white space for the works to hang on.

The Busan Biennale is one of the four great Asian Biennales. Together with Gwangju just 350km away, Shanghai and Yokohama, these exhibitions are the most important contemporary art exhibitions in Asia.

As an intensely watched region, Asia is interesting for its booming creative scene as well as its rising economy. Next to the three old art classics - Venice, Sao Paolo and Sydney - these young biennales become dynamic, significant events in an ever-growing circus of contemporary art.

Asian mega-exhibitions are as impressive, big and booming as the cities that hold them. Curated by important international curators, budgeted with well over $1 million and attended by international professionals and a huge local audience, they showcase the expanding Asian art scene and international artworks.

Over a million people will see this exhibition, a unique opportunity for the audience to experience the newest and most interesting international art.

A distinctive part of Busan is that a Concept Committee decides on the philosophical concept of the exhibition and invites curators to find artists to represent it.

This year, together with 85 other artists, curator Manu Park invited New Zealand artist Peter Robinson. Robinson not only represented New Zealand at the 2001 Venice Biennale but also was invited to the Lyon Biennale in 1999 and the Baltic Triennial in Lithuania 2002.

For Busan, Robinson installed a new version of End of the 20th Century, a huge floor sculpture, the first version of which was bought recently by the patrons of the Auckland Art Gallery.

Living for years in Berlin, Robinson is internationally one of New Zealand's most exhibited artists.

This year the concept was Chasm and Park concentrated mainly on the medium of moving image to illustrate the theme.

Over 50 per cent of the exhibited works were on video, projected in big rooms, installed like paintings on the latest flat screens or as installations with monitors. Though it was interesting to see so many narrative works in the end it became almost repetitive.

A Vietnamese artist talked about eating, a Swiss artist about childhood, a Lithuanian about growing up, a Korean about love, an English one about being drunk (certainly). With all these stories the Biennale took hours to see with some works running for 90 minutes or more.

Amid this giant film installation, Robinson's work was a great success not only because it was one of the few sculptures but also because it showed you do not have to make a movie to communicate a lot.

Robinson's sculpture was a smart take on information overflow, corporate world dominance and popular culture.

The sculpture had more layers and depth of meaning than many of the movies projected in the big black rooms or on the flat screens that most of the artists who produced the artworks could never afford.

* Busan, South Korea, to Oct 31