“Manifesto of Spring”

The National Asian Culture Center (ACC) in Gwangju is an appropriate setting for “Manifesto of Spring,” a group exhibition curated with ZKM in Karlsruhe and M+ in Hong Kong to mark ACC’s tenth anniversary. Conceived as a “pluralistic manifesto” for participatory forms of democratization amid social, political, and ecological turmoil, works by sixteen artists and collectives, fifteen new commissions among them, include an iteration of Territorial Agency’s Museum of Oil (2015–present).

Installed at the show’s entrance, three billboards emblazoned with images of Earth lean over eight vertical screens positioned like marker stones.1 Each depicts information—photographs, diagrams, notes—documenting the oil industry’s destructive capacities, not only through physical networks that extract and transport the substance, but also intercontinental agreements and investments often made without public consultation and in spite of community protest. Represented among the case studies is an aerial view of the 20,600-barrel crude oil spill on a North Dakota wheat field in 2013, three years before the Dakota Access Pipeline protests erupted against running an oil pipeline under Lake Oahe, the primary water source for the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

An introductory text to Museum of Oil states the project’s aim to keep oil in the ground, which of course requires radical action: something Gwangju understands well. The ACC is constructed next to the former Geumnam-ro Square, now known as 5.18 Democracy Square, on the site of the ex–South Jeolla Provincial Office. The last stand of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980 took place here, after students triggered a citywide rebellion against martial law imposed by the military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan. Violent state suppression of the protest—a history told in the 5.18 Archives, located on the Geumnam-ro thoroughfare where scores were killed—catalyzed South Korea’s democratization movement, and an initial plan to demolish the Office to make way for the ACC was reversed due to sustained community resistance. Kelvin Kyung Kun Park’s two-channel video 524m, following life from sunrise to sunset on Geumnam-ro, and A Perspective of a Volume (both works 2025), a 3D print of the road that hangs like a specter nearby, amplifies the fraught place that the Gwangju Uprising occupies in South Korean history. Here, the distinctive use of “democratization” rather than democracy encapsulates the constant negotiation between state and citizen that has defined the country’s postwar evolution. This was most recently witnessed in the astonishing civil response to an attempt by former president Yoon, who in 2023 sang “American Pie” at a White House state dinner, to re-introduce martial law in Korea, the following year, under the cover of night.

Welcome to Seoul Land! (2025) by YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, a characteristic text-based video unfolding to a jazz soundtrack, taps into these tensions. Imagining the perspective of an American “political refugee” in Korea, the script observes how Seoul looks to “Western democracy”—“you mean Western fascism,” the script points out immediately—for guidance. While this work refers to a nationalist ideology historically shaped by US imperialist hegemony, Dongjin Seo’s single-channel video installation Burning Coal and White Charcoal (2025) looks to another imperialist influence: the factory operated in Gwangju by Japanese-owned spinning company Kanebo during the Japanese colonial occupation, when Hwasun coal fueled Toyota-made looms. With Korean conglomerate Hyundai recently announcing plans to turn the Kanebo factory into a mall, the installation of Burning Coal… within the sprawling ACC complex highlights the constant pressures that capitalism exerts on communities through methods of obfuscation and appropriation. The six-part documentary The Plantation and the Museum (2021), by Renzo Martens and Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), makes that pressure palpable by exposing the asymmetric dynamics between colonial plantations in the Global South and cultural institutions in the North.

Nearby, Ho Rui An’s video installation of computer screens on a conference table documents Ho’s lecture-performance on China’s marketization from the late-1970s, The Economy Enters the People (2020), as neoliberalism transformed into an ideology of freedom that ironically has captured every aspect of human and non-human life. One line in Welcome to Seoul Land! resists that capture by describing democracy as “a free-form poem,” recalling the improvisation that defined movements like the anti-Yoon protests that persisted until his April 2025 impeachment and mobilized everyone from K-pop girlies to the nation’s farmers. Soun-Gui Kim’s three-channel video Forest Poem (2021–25), originally commissioned by Mori Art Museum with over 100 poets, artists, and philosophers reading poetry online, offers a global summation of that poetic view. Poet Nicolette Daskalakis recites “the world has ended and I still miss you,” which includes the lines “I pretend the dancefloor is underwater / and we have to keep kissing / in order to breathe.”

Daskalakis’s poem aligns perfectly with Zheng Bo’s two-channel video The Political Life of a Coral Reef 1 (2025), presented nearby. Drawing on Attar of Nishapur’s twelfth-century poem “The Conference of the Birds,” biologist Thomas D. Seeley’s 2010 book Honeybee Democracy, scientific research into fish behavior, and generative AI models, Zheng imagines how fish filmed in a coral reef might describe their political reality. “We live without kings,” reads one speech bubble. “Life is precarious. We just have to dance,” reads another, in what feels like a rephrase of another admission from the shoal: “We don’t want to die, but we’re not obsessed with living.” All of which brings to mind an idea paraphrased from the writings of anarchist Emma Goldman: that a revolution without “dancing” is no revolution at all.