KOREASCHOLAR

The prefix 'bio' with the meaning of 'life,' has been used for biotechnology, biochemistry, bioengineering, biomedicine, bioethics, bio-information as well as 'bio art' since 1990s. Bio art is an art as life itself and a kind of new direction in contemporary art that manipulates the processes of life. Bio artists use the properties of life and materials as scientists in laboratory of biology, and change organisms within their own species, of invents life with new characteristics. Technologically and socio-culturally, bio art has been connected with bioengineering. This essay is on the bio art that use vegetables, and on the specified gaze of so-called 'Sci-Artists.' Not only the genetically modified vegetables like works of George Gessert, Ackroyd & Harvey, and Eduardo Kac, but also the works made from the critical viewpoint like those of Paul Vanouse, Natalie Jeremijenko, and Amy Youngs, have 'the molecular gaze'(Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin's concept) of the genetic age in their art works. As the art history have showed, artists' gazes have insights about social problems that surround us. Bioartists' gazes reveal their insights about social and ethical problems, possibly concealed by science itself. Those problems are about results from practical discoveries of the sequencing of the genome, genetic engineering, cloning and reproduction of human and animals, body transformation, and the commercialization of cell and genes etc. We can find the significance of bioart in the molecular gaze about those problems, and we can rethink the identity of human, the reception of social influences from bio-technology and medicine.

• 전혜숙(이화여자대학교) | Jeon, Hyesook