Tenth-anniversary special exhibition
September 5, 2025–February 22, 2026
38 Munhwajeondang-ro
Gwangju
South Korea
Manifesto of Spring, co-produced by National Asian Culture Center (ACC), M+ Hong Kong, and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, marks the 10th anniversary of ACC. Revisiting its founding commitment to democracy and peace in Asia, the special exhibition confronts entrenched power structures to envision better future democracies. Through artistic exploration it detects unseen and helpful strategies that counter today’s most pressing global challenges, including the economic and colonial systems, and the climate crisis.
Climate disaster, war, fascism, poverty, and discrimination signal that the world is on the brink, but responsibility for this is not shared equally. While the Global North has produced the majority of carbon emissions since the mid-19th century, the concept of the “Anthropocene” which describes humanity’s dominant influence on the environment, masks this imbalance. Instead, environmental scholar Jason W. Moore identifies our era as the “Capitalocene”—where capitalism and colonialism created an extractive system that continues to devastate ecosystems as well as Indigenous life. The consequences are the humanitarian and social crisis we face today, all the while capital nonchalantly turns the climate crisis into yet another market.
Manifesto of Spring, however, does not dwell on the world’s demise. It presents artists, scientists, and theorists who offer new systems of thought, and signposts for new directions, that could help us to adapt and thrive beyond the ravages of modernity. The exhibition includes sixteen new commissions that venture thought experiments, focusing on the holistic entanglement of living things and sociotechnical environments we inhabit together. This is a declaration made through many different, noisy voices. It invites all to collectively weave the web of life further, and to transform the ruins to become the soil for new relations, reclaiming the spring that has never been truly lost.
Throughout the exhibition period, this trajectory unfolds further through various public programs. In October, White Cube, a video work by CATPC and Renzo Martens, will be screened, expanding the story of the Balot sculpture into a broader inquiry into the hidden entanglements between the Western art system and global capital. In November, ikkibawiKrrr will present Matbaegi (Tasting), a workshop where participants learn traditional village music and dance, filling the exhibition space with joyful rhythms. In December, the final chapter of Choi Chansook’s The Tumble trilogy will take place through an audio-visual performance led by two woman drummers. In January, researchers and artists Seo Dongjin and Ho Rui An will hold a dialogue that explores intersecting histories within the waves of globalization in modern and contemporary Asia.
Artists
Territorial Agency, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Dongjin Seo, Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), Ho Rui An, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, Kelvin Kyung Kun Park, Chansook Choi, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Zheng Bo, ikkibawiKrrr, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Soun-Gui Kim, Connie Zheng, James Bridle, 1995Hz
Curated by
Kim Jiha (Senior Curator , ACC), Lim Liwon (Curator, ACC), Jeon Minsu (Assistant Curator, ACC), Silke Schmickl (Senior Curator CHANEL, Head of Moving Image, M+), Kelly Li (Assistant Curator, Moving Image, M+), Alistair Hudson (Scientific Artistic Chairman, ZKM), Clara Runge (Curator, ZKM)
About ACC
National Asian Culture Center (ACC) is an international arts and cultural exchange organization that produces new, future-oriented results through the convergence of Asia’s past and present arts and culture with innovative ideas and beliefs. Having the context of artistically sublimating the significance of the May 18th Democratic Movement’s human rights and peace as its point of departure, ACC, which opened in November 2015, is a Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism–affiliated institution established for the advancement of mutual understanding and cooperative growth with different Asian countries through exchange, education, research, and other efforts with regard to Asian culture.
ACC plays the role of an integrated platform for participants from Asia and the rest of the world to freely unite and exchange their ideas while transcending boundaries in carrying out the steps of research, creation, and production. At ACC, diverse and dynamic programs (exhibitions, performances, education, creation) using collected research data, resources., are held year-round with the creative output of experts from various fields who have exchanged their creativity and ingenuity with one another.
About M+
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District (WestK), it is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. M+ is a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.
About ZKM
Founded in 1989, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe stands worldwide for an open concept of art in the digital age. Here, art collecting and archive research are linked with artistic research on the electronic arts. Through these interdisciplinary connections, ZKM not only presents milestones of 20th and 21st century media art, but also contributes to its further development. Whether exhibitions, symposia, publications, concert programs, or digital formats—ZKM is the platform for the discourses of art and technology in exchanges with society, science, business, and politics. Their mission is to investigate and better understand the effects of the media and digital world on us humans.
