KUNSTDISCO SEOUL

Goethe-Institut 1988

Official German Cultural Contribution to the Olympic Summer Games in Seoul 1988.

Musical Conception and Direction: STRÖER BROS.

Watch the Video: KunstDisco Seoul Ouverture

"KunstDisco big hit with Korean youth"
Korea Herald, October 1988

"The Ströer Brothers Hans Peter and Ernst Ströer have inspired 25 young German composers to produce new music for the KunstDisco ... to which the Korean youth dances like crazy, so that night after night a long queue forms in front of the entrance..."
Die Zeit, September 1988

"The gigantic discotheque, located opposite the Korea Broadcasting System Annex Hall on the tip of Yoido Islet, adjacent to the Indonesian Embassy, brimmed with ecstasy and artistic talent during the two-hour premiere performance on opening night.

Avant-garde performers in farcial attire and make-up, synthesizer-spliced live and taped music, dancing floodlights and laser beams creating a variety of images and messages enthralled more then 1500 spectators, who eventually joined the German dancers, moving hand in hand to the rock tunes at the end of the performance.

Designs and messages are illuminated on the wall of buildings across the river, allowing the neighbors and the people in the cars passing by to appreciate the German high-tech artistry every night throughout the Olympic period." Korea Times, September 1988

"KunstDisco is an ultra-modern combination of art, technology and popular entertainment"
Korean Air Magazine, September 1988

"The lumbering Germans, however, went lighter than ever: they erected on the river island of Youido, near a sweeping, glistening skyscraper more than sixty stories high, of glass and steel and wood, a ... bright, barn-like building with a monopitch roof, architecturally a reminder of Schwitters' legendary Dada merzbau overlaid by Coop Himmelblau's predatory motto "The harder the times, the harder the architecture," by Frank Gehry's cottage romanticism and Behnisch's Hysolar Institute linkage.

And they gave the seemingly useless thing the job of temporarily functioning as an "art disco." Well: the thing worked ... Evening after evening, people fraternized under the sign of this multimedia aesthetic to form cheerfully bouncing groups, as ordered by the Art Festival motto "Harmony, Peace and Progress." So even the loud and the crooked can bring people together, not just "Freude schöner Götterfunken".
Bauwelt No. 4, April 1988

"The sounds congenially interpret the architecture ... In the first eleven KunstDisco days after the opening alone, around 25000 mostly young visitors came. At 5 p.m. daily, the rhythmically quivering, also visually seemingly collapsing curiosity opens ... "
FAZ, September 1988

"KunstDisco Seoul goes far beyond the ideas associated with a conventional discotheque. It is a total work of art that aims to appeal to all the senses, with a wide-ranging palette of musical and artistic performances including dance, video, fashion, lighting effects, design and architectural components, in short, a colorful three-week happening ... According to our information, no other country in the world will present a comparable project in Seoul."
SZ, September 1988

Giacomo Lee's brillant retrospektive of the KunstDisco for Red Bull Music Academy Daily 2018