You Must Change Your Life

The 16th Gwangju Biennale, You Must Change Your Life, opens to the public on September 5, 2026. Curated by Artistic Director Ho Tzu Nyen with Che Kyongfa, Gahee Park, and Brian Kuan Wood, the exhibition brings together 43 artists and groups who have spent years—in some cases, entire lifetimes—exploring how change unfolds across every conceivable scale.

The title is the famous final line of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, in which an encounter with a broken ancient statue transforms the viewer’s way of seeing: they can no longer continue as before. Yet neither the poem nor the exhibition prescribes how such transformation should take place.

Held entirely within a single building, this is one of the Biennale’s most focused editions. Rather than extending outward across space, it proposes a different kind of journey: one that leads visitors progressively deeper inside, only for the deepest interior to open again onto the furthest outside. The exhibition unfolds through five galleries, each with its own terrain, atmosphere, and rhythm. 

Gallery 1 opens onto a flooded landscape of molecular activity; Gallery 2 becomes a binary field where bodies face one another across a line—touching, disciplining, caring; Gallery 3 grows into a forest where knowledge takes root through cultivation and collective life; Gallery 4 darkens into night, passing through sleep, ancestral dreams, and planetary time; Gallery 5 dissolves into air, breath, sound, and language. The exhibition turns change into something visitors can feel through a series of repetitions and variations unfolding across five galleries. 

Some artists are represented by a single work: a concentrated point that opens onto a world, while others like Rim Dong Sik, Sasaki Ken, Nina Canell, Rossella Biscotti, and Goldin+Senneby return through works made over years or decades. These recurrences give artistic practice weight, shape, and duration, allowing visitors to follow how questions, bodies, and ways of living change over time. A single work can condense a world; a sequence can reveal the trajectory of a practice—and sometimes of a life.

The Biennale asks how the slow and sudden coexist within the same process. Tehching Hsieh’s year-long performance, in which he punched a time clock every hour for an entire year, embodies duration as discipline, while Jeju’s volcanic rocks—volcanic bombs, lava tree casts, stalactites, and stalagmites, cared for by Jeju Stone Park—fuse millennia of geological pressure with seconds of violent release: the exhibition’s oldest participants.

The exhibition itself changes continuously. Angela Goh’s Craft (2026) is performed four times daily; Sunik Kim’s The Light in the Factory (2026) lasts 496 hours, spanning every public opening hour; and each night, a selection from James T. Hong’s Apologies (2012–), an archive of official apologies now totaling 10 hours and 43 minutes, is projected onto the Biennale Hall façade. E Roon Kang uses AI to generate a poem from an image of each participating artist’s work, circulating through posters, AI-generated voices, and merchandise. Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s Not Exactly BPM (Variation Rrose) (2026), a deconstructed club environment moving to an original composition by techno artist Rrose, can be entered directly from the Biennale Plaza without a ticket.

In Gwangju, change has never been abstract. The May Mothers House—a community of women whose lives were shaped by the May 18 Democratic Uprising of 1980—presents 322 paintings created through ongoing workshops with artist Joo Hong. Huh Baek-ryun (1891–1977), who co-founded the Gwangju Agricultural Technical High School in 1947 under the principle of sam-ae—love for heaven, land, and humanity—is presented through paintings, calligraphy, tea utensils, and “spring snow tea.” Christian Nyampeta revisits the Gwangju Citizens’ Art School through workshops and a library assembled between New York and Gwangju.

Opening week includes Bullim (Augmentation) (2026) by Kwon Byungjun and Park Chan-kyong, reinterpreting the Korean shamanic ritual of soegeollip with instruments made from metal donated by citizens of Gwangju and South Jeolla Province, alongside Haepari and a techno set by Rrose.