One of the foremost exhibitions of contemporary art in Japan, the International Contemporary Art Festival, will be held at the Tokyo International Forum Nov. 3-7.

Informally known as NICAF and held since 1992, this event was organized to promote contemporary art and increase its accessibility to the general public. Showcasing the works of established and emerging young artists and a chorale of works of art from many internationally renowned galleries, it has the distinction of being the largest contemporary art festival in Asia.

This year's exhibition, the sixth to be held, features works from 91 galleries and 350 artists, for an astonishing total of 2,500 pieces of artwork on display. A total of 71 Japanese galleries and 20 from overseas will be represented, including galleries in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Hong Kong, Korea, Russia and the United States.

The Korean contingent of galleries has an important role in this year's show, as Japan is the largest market for contemporary art in Asia and an important source of funding for Korean artists and galleries. Korean galleries at NICAF '99 are receiving additional support from the Agency of Cultural Affairs of South Korea.

Among the 14 Korean galleries represented is Seorim Art Gallery, which has devoted its space to the installation art of Kim Hyekyung. Kim's exhibit, a series titled "Those Who Are Waiting for Rebirth," is a dynamic representation of fantasy that combines the format of the traditional Asian folding screen with a modern approach to artistic expression. One part of the installation consists of two sets of folding screens, silvery aluminum panels that are 2 meters in height and dotted with assemblages of brass bolts. The patterns formed by each screen's array of bolts depict ancient colossal stone monuments, called goindol in Korean.

The key to understanding Kim's artistic message is to absorb the historical distortion and reinvention continually taking place in the modern world when ancient forms are reinterpreted. Kim's installation juxtaposes these ancient forms with contemporary materials, creating a post-modernist sense of displacement and allowing for the rebirth of these motifs in a new setting. Kim attributes her inspiration to the generational cycle of life that allows for continuous absorption and reamalgamation of established cultural forms, and expresses the hope that her installations will act as a bridge between tradition and modernity.

A graduate of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music with a doctorate in environmental design, Kim is a provocative artist whose imagination aims to erase the boundaries of nationality and time. The second part of her installation consists of four sets of wooden folding screens. These screens make use of "traditional" materials such as the Japanese indigo blue cloth they are covered with, as well as the oiled paper called yuji in Korean which is typically used to cover floors in traditional Korean homes. Using stencils cut from yuji paper, she has painted fantastical creatures with gold paste. These figures, created from her own imagination, contrast startlingly with the indigo blue background, resulting in a slightly dissonant yet fascinating marriage of Korean and Japanese media.

In addition to the commercial venues it has previously provided for contemporary art, NICAF '99 has set aside a gallery space for a nonprofit exhibition. This show, devoted to nine sculptures by Siobhan Hapaska, will be the first exhibition of her works in Japan.

Hapaska, who received her masters of fine arts from Goldsmith College in London, has exhibited widely in England, Ireland and the United States. Her work has defied interpretation in the art world, being characterized as walking a fine line between figurative and abstract art. In interviews she has expressed disapproval of any attempt to typecast her work as "space-age" or futuristic, instead aligning herself with those who would iconoclastically fuse primordial landscapes with modern technological forms.

The resulting confusion provided by such representation resonates with the art of Kim Hyekyung, who also plays with modernism and its fixation with form and material. One of the sculptures being presented by Siobhan Hapaska at NICAF '99 is "Land," a 1998 work in fiberglass and blue-gray acrylic paint with cavities that hold aquatic plants and water. The sculpture itself has the appearance of a large boulder, while the smooth, glistening surface belies this form, providing a contrasting tactile sensation of movement akin to the rushing blur of the gleaming surface of a high-speed racing car.

This simultaneous portrayal of stasis and movement embodies the work of Hapaska, a marriage of smooth, hard, technologically produced surfaces of modernity with the warm and humanizing influences of nature. As viewers contemplate this sculpture, they are ironically likely to recall the experience of observing old stones in a Buddhist temple garden with plants growing in the sunken depressions that have collected rain water.

Such is the dilemma of Hapaska's sculpture and Kim's panel installations, which ask us to discard outmoded boundaries of nationality, history and conventional uses of materials. Freed from such restrictions, these artists and many others at the NICAF '99 exhibition provide the opportunity to alter our impressions of the world around us and its origins. Collapsing boundaries of time and geography, we are able to enter into a dialogue with culture and the environment, creating new world views that mediate the harshness of contemporary life.