“Exhibitions of Resistance”: A Short History of Korea’s Biennials

The art world moves this week to Korea, with the openings of Frieze and KIAF art fairs, Seoul Art Week, and the Gwangju and Busan Biennales.

The arrival of that caravan begs the question of why contemporary art—and the biennial format—has assumed such a prominent place in the country's cultural life. A new project by e-flux Criticism, entitled Korean Biennials Today, reflects on what the exhibition format means to the republic, and what its evolution might tell us about the changing nature of biennials internationally. 

We begin with a short history of the biennials that emerged from the republic’s democratic transformation.

The history of biennials in Korea is also a history of pro-democratic resistance. When the country’s first major international biennial opened in Gwangju in 1995, it marked the fifteenth anniversary of May 18, 1980, when student-led protests against Chun Doo-hwan’s military dictatorship resulted in the massacre of at least 196 people. 

The decision to host this landmark exhibition in a bastion of Korean pro-democratic civil resistance was significant, explicitly linking the local “Gwangju spirit” to the international system of contemporary art.1 Unusually among biennials, Gwangju thus serves as a monument to anti-totalitarian resistance and maintains an explicit commitment to progressive politics into the present, expressing a national identity based on democracy and internationalism.  

Marking the intersection of several histories—from the domestic struggle against oppression to an exhibition model with roots in late-nineteenth-century Europe—these landmark shows also exemplify what Ranjit Hoskote, a co-curator of the 7th Gwangju Biennale, has called “biennales of resistance.” In the wake of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed 2024 attempt to overthrow the democratic government and an ongoing, international reckoning with the biennial format (evidenced by the controversies to have recently engulfed Documenta and the Venice Biennale), it feels timely to reflect on the circumstances out of which these exhibitions emerged, the questions they sought to answer, and how they might adapt to the rapidly changing conditions now reshaping the culture.

“The Biennial Spirit”

Perhaps the earliest and most succinct expressions of Korea’s biennial spirit, one that helped pave the way for the first Gwangju Biennale, was broadcast in September 1988 over public TV stations from China to the US. Nam June Paik’s 47-minute variety program Wrap Around the World suggested what a Korean biennial might look like: a networked system of global exchange in which Korea played a central, unifying role. 

The show began with an introduction to the alien who intends to obliterate Earth with a “death ray” as punishment for mankind’s “virulent nationalism.” Luckily for mankind, performances by Paik, David Bowie, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the Vienna Philharmonic—alongside Korean percussionists, dancers, and other performers—are enough to persuade the alien that Earth is worth saving after all. Wrap Around the World lived up to its title: 50 million people watched it simultaneously.

As well as reflecting Paik’s faith in the potential of art to transcend cultural divides, his show captured the optimistic mood of a newly democratic country as it emerged from a century of colonial occupation, war, national division, and authoritarianism. It was timed to coincide with the opening of the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, another cultural event which signaled that the country had begun to embrace, in spectacular fashion, the spirit of international cooperation. These conditions ultimately led to the establishment of the Gwangju Biennale.

A “common precariousness”

To understand the particular blend of national status and international cooperation, it is helpful to understand how the biennial model (like its near-coeval, the modern Olympics) was born and the ideologies it enshrines. That story begins in 1895, with the First International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice.

The show was modeled on the “world’s fair” exhibitions, and (establishing a precedent) was designed to elevate the city’s cultural standing at a time when attention was focused on Paris and Vienna; its competitive system of national pavilions followed in 1907. During that same period, Korea’s rejection of ties with the West had led it to be dubbed the Hermit Kingdom; at the end of the century, the country’s embrace of biennials marked its entry into that same international network of cultural exchange and diplomacy. Following the first edition of the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1951, however, that system had begun to change in important ways, expanding away from the European centers to include territories once deemed “peripheral” to contemporary art. Korea’s biennials form part of this counter-history, too.

During the “boom” of the eighties and nineties—facilitated in part by the plummeting cost to consumers of air travel— Brisbane, Cairo, Fukuoka, Havana, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Shanghai, Sharjah, Taipei and later Kochi all established “biennales of resistance.” These exhibitions occur in “newly evolving regionalities” outside of the old colonial centers and share not only common thematic concerns but a “common precariousness.” They commemorate historical struggles—against colonial occupation, dictatorship, and other forces of oppression—and resist the dominant cultural narratives of the West. 

As Anthony Gardner and Charles Green put it in their 2016 book on the form, these exhibitions have contributed a broader “alignment of cultures outside the usual binary axis of Cold War politics.”  That paradigm is not easy to escape in Korea, yet the inauguration in 2022 of Frieze Seoul underscores that realignment in art market terms. In 2018, Gwangju adapted a national pavilion model to “pursue a vision of globalization rooted in regional identity” yet, in a significant contrast to Venice, the system fosters connections between western and local Korean art institutions on a resource-sharing basis and does not require that participants’ be recognized by Korea as sovereign nations. 

The connection to the Venice Biennale is historical as well as formal. In 1993, Paik won the Golden Lion for a show inspired by Marco Polo’s journey along the Silk Road from Venice to China—a metaphor for his attempts to bridge eastern and western cultures. In a rejoinder to the nation-state model that also spoke of his home country’s cultural standing at that time, he won representing Germany (alongside Hans Haacke) and not Korea, which did not yet have a pavilion. Today, by contrast, Korea’s pavilion occupies the highest elevation of the Giardini, overlooking the pavilions of Japan—its former colonizer—and Germany.

In 1993, Paik played a central role (reportedly contributing 150,000 dollars of his own) in bringing the Whitney Biennial to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon. Critically derided at the time in the US for the heavy-handed politics of the works, and considered an example of cultural imperialism by some in Korea, “Beyond the Border Line” tackled themes such as racism, AIDS, and marginalization in ways that resonated with Korea’s history of resistance to colonial and authoritarian oppression. 

Displayed amongst the new-media and installation works, for instance, was the amateur witness video of the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police in 1991, an incident bound to resonate with recent Korean experiences of police brutality. “I’m putting on this difficult exhibition to give young people strong teeth that can break and eat any type of food,” Paik wrote at the time. The show was a shock to an art scene dominated by minjung or People’s Art movement and abstraction, and was another crucial catalyst for the country’s first major biennial of its own.

Segyehwa, or “world change”

Also in 1993, president Kim Young-sam’s policy of Segyehwa came into effect. This decade-long program of far-reaching economic and cultural liberalizations was predicated on the understanding that the country’s prosperity was inextricable from that of the rest of the planet. Highly nationalist in flavor yet globalist in outlook, Segyehwa (literally “world change”) aimed to boost the competitiveness in what Kim, in a 1995 speech, called the “borderless global economy.” Well into the presidency of Kim’s successor Kim Dae-jung, who in 1998 remarked that “diplomacy in the twenty-first century will center around economy and culture,” contemporary art was not an adjunct of but central to these efforts. 

In late 1994, one year into Segyehwa, the Gwangju Metropolitan Government finalized plans for the new exhibition to be held in the city famous for democratic resistance, establishing a founding committee and appointing a director, Lee Yongwoo, and a seven curators responsible for the “global regions” to be covered by the show. Despite the tight deadline for such a major—indeed unprecedented—event, the government pushed for the show to open the following year, mobilizing its civil servants in a concerted, government-led push. Paik again played a direct role, co-curating the InfoART pavilion of new-media art (a precursor of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale) around the theme of “interactivity” and proposing the structuring concept of “five oceans, six continents” that endures today.

When the first Gwangju Biennale opened in September 1995, its title “Beyond the Borders” echoed Kim’s description of the globalized world. The exhibition sent a “message of global citizenship,” presenting 87 artists from 49 countries in venues across the city. Rather than “wrap around the world,” it invited the world to Korea. At the end of its 62-day run some 1.6 million visitors had attended the show. By way of comparison, the highest attendance recorded at Venice in its 130-year history was in 2022, when 800,000 visitors attended the 59th edition. As if to underscore the point, Korea’s national pavilion at Venice was inaugurated in its centenary year of 1995. Sixteen editions and one permanent exhibition hall later and Gwangju, the first international art biennial in the Asia-Pacific region, remains its largest and most significant.

In 1995, the Ministry of Culture and Sports’s “Year of Art” program had been conceived to draw international attention to Korean artists fifty years after the end of Japanese colonial rule, marking a cultural break from an era of imperial oppression. It also marked 15 years since the student-led Democratic Uprising in Gwangju, and this connection to historical rupture resembles the model established by documenta in Kassel in 1955. In Kassel, rose gardens were planted in the rubble of World War Two. The Gwangju Biennale, by contrast, turned the city into a “living memorial.” The exhibition “artistically sublimated” Gwangju’s “spirit of resistance” to position the city “as a sacred site of democracy.” 

A standout work from the edition was Kimsooja’s piece Sewing into Walking – Dedicated to the Victims of Gwangju. For this installation, she scattered 2.5 tons of old clothes and bedsheets over a forest floor, the fragile fabric bundled into human-like forms whilst a looped recording of John Lennon’s “Imagine” (1971) played from speakers. Yet some Korean artists felt that the high-budget, western-style biennial glossed over a painful history rather than commemorating it, failing properly to understand the local context or commemorate the struggle of its people in its embrace of a neoliberal world economy. 

Reconciliation or capitulation?

Several artists responded by organizing an “anti-biennale” at a cemetery for the victims of the Democratic Uprising. Showcasing the politically charged murals, banners, satirical sculptures and woodblock prints of some 250 artists, mostly working in the minjung movement, the show was sharply opposed to the main exhibition. By the time the second Gwangju Biennale came around in 1997, however, Kang Yeon-kyun, the Gwangju-based artist who directed the anti-biennale, had been appointed Secretary-General of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. The “anti-biennale” itself, meanwhile, was incorporated into the main exhibition. Some interpreted these moves as capitulation; for others, they were evidence of reconciliation.

In 2000, the founding of Soul Mediacity Biennale further emphasizing the links Paik sought to foster between new media and contemporary art in Korea. After that date, Gwangju expanded its reach, appointing international curators including Okwui Enwezor, Massimiliano Gioni, Jessica Morgan, and Maria Lind. For its 2008 edition, Enwezor conceived of the exhibition as a “report” on the state of international art, shifting its emphasis from spectacular exhibition to critical forum by staging dialogues between curators alongside restaging of existing shows. 

After the turn of the millennium, more biennials emerged as a means of elevating regional and marginalized practices, drawing on a mixture of government and private funding, alongside institutional support from Korea and abroad, to connect them to broader audiences while expanding the definition of where and how biennials can operate. The Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale, founded in 2004, celebrated a spirit of feminist resistance in Korea with an exclusive focus on women artists. Picking up on the theme, the ninth edition of Gwangju, 2012’s “ROUNDTABLE,” eschewed a single director in favor of six female co-directors for an “open-ended series of collaborations.” Nicolas Bourriaud’s edition in 2024, “Pansori,” which closed just two days prior to Yeol’s attempted imposition of martial law, positioned the city as a “soundscape.” For the sixteenth edition this year, a curatorial team led by Ho Tzu Nyen will focus on the “transformative power” of collective practices in response to global uncertainty. 

Busan: the port city

Despite Gwangju’s legitimate claim to be the first international biennial of contemporary art in Korea, the Busan Youth Biennale predated it by 14 years. At its inception, however, this was a local, irregular, and artist-led exhibition in which 84 artists and collectives aged under forty, and exhibited for seven days in commercial galleries scattered across the city. In contrast to Gwangju, Busan is privately funded. Its history reflects how Korean biennials have adapted, often by connecting otherwise separate exhibitions—as happened with Gwangju’s “anti-biennale.” Over the years, Busan has grown to incorporate the Sea Art Festival (an outdoor exhibition of site-specific work on Busan’s beaches, launched in 1987) and the Busan International Outdoor Sculpture Symposium (first held in 1991) to become, in 1998, the Pusan International Contemporary Art Festival (PICAF). In 2002, after rebranding to coincide with its role as a host city for that year’s soccer World Cup, it has been the Busan Biennial. 

As the co-curator of the 4th Gwangju Biennale Hou Hanru has put it, the biennial “is always a site-specific project” that can generate new ways for those who already live there to relate to art, their shared environment, and one another. That is particularly true of Busan. As with Liverpool, historically a port city that since 1998 has been home to the UK’s oldest and largest international biennial, Busan does not aim to overlook but rather draw attention to the industrial architecture that attests to these histories, exhibiting works in empty warehouses and shipyards, its beaches and bustling harbors. The former wire and rope factory known today as F1963, for example, is one of the signature spaces. 

Busan has consistently represented a grassroots, artist-focused counterpart to Gwangju embedding in its industrial surrounds, evoking labor, the sea, maritime history and environments, and displacement. A standout work from recent editions is Mire Lee’s Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Young-do Sea. In this monumental site-specific installation, shown as part of 2022’s “We, on the Rising Wave,” Lee installed a 21-metre-tall scaffolding structure over which she draped enormous, sail-like sheets with numerous large, circular perforations, the white edges of which were stained with black oil. The piece was installed on the island of Yeongdo, formerly a major shipyard and hub for displaced persons during the Korean War, in a former shipbuilding warehouse. Adding to the resonance of its location in the era of climate breakdown, the roof and walls of the building had been partially destroyed by an earlier typhoon. 

“Has the world grown weary of art biennials?”

To the dismay of critics such as Peter Schjeldahl, who coined the term “festivalism” to critique a form that has endured two world wars and multiple economic crises, biennials remain perhaps the most consequential exhibition format in global culture. A 2018 worldwide survey by On Curating counted 316 “biennial-type events in the contemporary arts, though perhaps many more exist.” Korea now boasts regular landmark exhibitions focused on public sculpture, design, architecture, urbanism, and craft, yet the international system of economic interdependence and democratic nationhood upon which biennales depend has given way to a world that is now, as Enwezor put it in his influential curatorial statement for the 56th edition of Venice, “shattered and in disarray.” 

A question raised by the headline of a recent Guardian article, meanwhile, summed up a prevailing mood as to the form’s relevance in an increasingly dislocated, multipolar world: “Has the world grown weary of art biennials?” A more pressing question might be: Will they continue to exist in their current form—one that for all its faults allows for freedom of expression among artists and curators? And will the international audiences these exhibitions are designed to attract still be able to attend them?

In a world in which “virulent nationalism” is sharply on the rise, biennials may transition from reflecting the conditions of democracy to actively defending them. Far from sounding the death knell of the form, thinkers such as Oliver Marchant have argued that “we may currently be witnessing the dawn of a new era,” in which biennials in postcolonial countries including Korea stand as powerful symbols of emancipation against oppression. 

Two years after Yeol’s attempted coup, after all, the biennials’s commitment to pro-democratic principles as expressed through culture no longer feels like a relic of a past age (as this supplement’s interview with Binna Choi makes clear). The “biennale of resistance” model exemplified by Gwangju in 1995 may yet be a powerful tool as democracy, in Korea and elsewhere, comes under strain. Ho Tzu Nyen recently acknowledged that while biennials can induce “repetition and exhaustion” they can also be energizing: not “fixed models” but “provisional structures” that offer a “temporary concentrations of forces.” It is be hoped that those forces will continue to gather and circulate.

This essay is taken from Korean Biennials Today, a special project by e-flux with Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS). 

e-flux Criticism's editor-in-chief Ben Eastham will be speaking to Amal Khalaf (co-curator of the 2026 Busan Biennale) and Hallie Ayres (co-curator of the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale) about the future of the biennial model as part of the Kiaf SEOUL x KAMS x Frieze Seoul Talks Program on Saturday, September 5.