Which scents capture a nation’s past? Artist Koo Jeong A sought to answer that question in the Korean Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale.
The result was “Odorama Cities,” a scent portrait of the Korean peninsula distilled from some 600 olfactory memories of Koreans and those with any connection to it, including residents, visitors, adoptees, and expats like Koo themself (who has lived in Europe since 1991). That pool of recollections, submitted through a public open call last summer, was then categorized by Koo into 17 distinct smell concepts that 14 perfumers from France, China, Singapore, Japan, Ireland, and South Korea translated into actual scents.
Some of the fragrances are nature inspired, capturing peninsula’s salty sea air, for example, as well as the familiar fog, red pine trees (Korea’s national tree), and spring-blooming magnolias and azaleas. Other pavilion aromas are based on food, befitting a country whose cuisine has in recent years come to be celebrated around the world: One conjures jang-dok-dae, the traditional earthen jars used for fermenting kimchi, with elements of soybean paste and chili paste, while another re-creates the mouthwatering smell of cooked rice with sesame oil and soy sauce, a Korean standard.
The most intriguing smells are grounded in modern Korean life. The Scent of Seoul, for example, incorporates the damp, earthy odor of mold and mildew (inspired by the metropolis’s humid months), while labdanum resinoid points toward sweat and back alleys. Old Electronics—composed of black pepper, steel accord, and frankincense—is like cracking open a broken radio, summoning well-worn plastic, metal, burnt rubber, and dust. And Grandparents’ House, surely a potent smell memory the world over, is evoked by notes of musty wood and old fabric.
All these aromas and more mingle freely courtesy of egg-like diffusers hidden around the Korean Pavilion, a modest two-room steel-and-glass structure overlooking the Venetian Lagoon that this year is adorned with only a low, wooden Möbius ring that serves as a bench. As one moves through the wide-open wood-floor space, it’s nearly impossible to discern any specific fragrance.
That’s by design, Koo tells me inside the pavilion, their tiny frame perched on the ring. “It’s about going beyond boundaries and talking about a country in an inclusive and expanded way,” they say in a voice scarcely above a whisper. “Typically all the national pavilions here are very divided. With this, I hope to push beyond nations and borders toward a common future. I even hope for a transnational pavilion at the Biennale someday—I would happily present a project for that.”
Site-specific installations that engage the senses and interrogate perception and ephemerality are some of the artist’s signatures. “Koo’s practice is making the invisible visible,” says Seolhui Lee, who curated the pavilion with fellow Denmark-based curator Jacob Fabricius. That often involves combining architectural elements with texts, drawings, paintings, sculptures, films, and installations as well as invisible elements like temperature and sound.
And of course scent. The Seoul-born artist (and recent Loewe campaign model) has worked with odors and memory since the early days of their three-decade career. In 1996’s Pullover’s Wardrobe, they strategically placed mothballs in their Paris studio, referencing the smell of their grandmother’s closet, as an exploration of memory. In 2011’s Before the Rain, a fragrance meant to capture the humid air of an Asian city before rain filled an empty New York gallery. And at London’s Charing Cross Station in 2016, Odorama gestured at the former noisy bustle of an unused platform with scent, light, and shadows.
After all, smell has stronger ties to memories and emotions than any other sense. “From the moment of birth, scents establish a connection to our parents, later attracting us to people and places and sparking our curiosity,” the curators note in the exhibition catalog. “Despite being undervalued, scents play a crucial role as they provide comfort and evoke subconscious sentiments.”
In Venice, the pavilion’s spare serenity puts the focus squarely on the sense of smell—which comes as something of a salve after a stretch of pavilions teeming with overstimulating works jostling for audiovisual attention.
And salves happen to be the stock-in-trade of up-and-coming lifestyle beauty brand Nonfiction, which spearheaded the creation of all the pavilion scents. The Seoul-based company launched in 2019 with scent-led body care, and it’s now regarded as part of K-beauty’s new wave, with three warmly minimalist stores in the Korean capital. It has many more stockists there, in Tokyo and Hong Kong, and a small but growing collection of retailers in Europe and the US.
Nonfiction was well matched to partner with the pavilion on this project since the brand “strives to infuse emotion and inspiration into daily life through unique narratives and scent,” according to founder Haeyoung Cha. “Koo is renowned for majestically exploring the poetics of everyday life, and ‘Odorama Cities’ serves an inspired chronicle of the peninsula’s history and a reminder of Korea’s extensive scent stories.”
The pavilion’s smaller adjacent room houses just a single glow-in-the-dark plinth bearing a bronze sculpture, a playful, peace-sign-wielding figure captured mid hop. (Levitating is a theme in Koo’s work; see the glow-in-the-dark skate parks they’ve constructed in cities around the world for the past 12 years.) Every two minutes the figure—which, like the Möbius ring, represents infinity, another preoccupation of Koo’s—emits from its nostrils steam with yet another scent.
That’s the eau de parfum Odorama Cities, created by legendary perfumer Dominique Ropion, the mastermind behind some of the world’s most iconic fragrances. Each of Odorama Cities’ main notes—sandalwood, mugwort, incense, and tuberose—reflects scent memories from the decades that immediately followed the Korean War, as the country moved from agrarian to industrialized and eventually highly urbanized. Sandalwood, for example, comes from Korea’s sea, forests, and mountains, mentioned in many memories from the 1960s; incense, with accords of ambergris, aldehyde, and asphalt, evokes the subway’s cold air and engines humming in the night air, correlating with the most recent remembrances, since 2010.
Ropion, surprisingly, has never visited Korea. “I would love to go, of course,” the debonair French nose tells me on the Gritti Palace terrace, soaking in the surrounding aromas of the pungent Grand Canal, the over-perfumed art-world elite, and our cooling espressos.
He knew little of the country and its history prior to this project, although he’s a fan of the darkness and cynicism of Korean cinema and raves about the film Parasite. “And I know Koreans love perfumes,” Ropion adds. Indeed, Korea’s fragrance market has exploded in the past six years, especially among younger generations. (In the catalog, critic Young June Lee contributes a fascinating essay about how Korea’s previous smells—from industry, bathrooms, hospitals, and cars—have been regulated out of existence over the past three decades.)
Sight unseen, then, Ropion was supplied with photos of the country and a bouquet of its common smells: wood, incense, rice, spices, bath aromatics, scents from its volcanoes, and flowers, like magnolias. “From this,” he says, “I had to imagine a country.” In his four-decade career, he’d never had such a brief before: “It’s the first time I’ve traveled to a country solely through scent.”
Ropion also collaborated on the pavilion scent concepts, placing him further in unfamiliar territory. “As a perfumer, you’re supposed to make something that smells nice that one can wear,” he says, smiling. With the scent Fish Market, however, concocted from a seaweed absolute along with fish and salt accords, “the brand said, ‘It smells too nice—it needs to be stinkier!’ That never happens.”
Creating a commercial scent distilled from 16 unwearable odors about a country he’d never set foot in was no simple task. But to Ropion the ultimate arbiters of its success will be those whose memories were infused into the perfume (which is now available through Nonfiction’s stores and global online shop). “When the team in Korea smelled what I had done, they were very moved,” he shares. “For them it means something. And that’s always the goal with perfume—a scent that touches people very deeply.”
