September 5–November 15, 2026
Unsurprisingly, the first question at the 16th Gwangju Biennale’s press conference addressed the diplomatic firestorm surrounding the Taiwan pavilion. In early August, promotional materials were released by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation identifying “NTMoFA” (after the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts) rather than “Taiwan” as an exhibitor, prompting condemnation from Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture, an official correction, and the China Pavilion’s subsequent withdrawal citing the “One China” policy. Quick to separate the central show from the pavilion program, artistic director Ho Tzu Nyen passed the question to Youn Bum-mo, the Gwangju Biennale Foundation’s president. Youn promptly apologized for the fallout before asking the press not to overlap art and politics—a dissonant request given the Biennale’s founding in 1995 to memorialize Gwangju’s May 1980 democratic uprising, a defining event in South Korea’s postwar democratization struggle.
Still, Youn’s response felt fitting given two works in the central show that are literally directed at the institution. James T. Hong’s single-channel Apologies (2012–ongoing) is a growing video compilation of apologies broadcast by heads of state or government: “a timeline of modern political progress as unrepentant recidivism and contrite repetition,” Hong notes in a wall text. That critique is anchored by the work’s nightly screening on the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall’s facade, which faces the Foundation’s offices across a public plaza, in front of which a kiosk broadcasts Sunik Kim’s 496-hour sound work, The Light in the Factory (2026). Named after a 1978 norae-gut (“song-ritual”) written by Kim Min-Ki to support the labor movement amid military dictatorship, Kim’s reworking draws on the banned performance’s decomposition through cassette reproduction. Extending that logic of dilution is “Threading Zero,” an accompanying essay written by Kim and distributed as a pamphlet and PDF, which describes the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall as “a monument to the failure of the revolutionary movement,” given its absorption into the business of commemoration.
With that, Light in the Factory’s accompanying description poses a vital question: What can a work of art “still do inside the very machine that would absorb it”? The question’s relevance to art workers, including those in institutions, felt palpable at the press conference, when Ho closed the gap that Youn opened between art and politics by differentiating “artistic time” from the present’s “limited attention span” in his response—a neat conceptual return to the central show that he curated with Gahee Park, Brian Kuan Wood, and Che Kyongfa. Quoting the last line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1908 poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” “You must change your life” considers transformation as multi-scalar, intergenerational, and ever-evolving: a perspective that transcends the temporal limits of nationalism and institutional inertia.
Rilke’s poem is printed on a glass wall at the exhibition’s entrance, behind which Goldin+Senneby’s Resin Pond (2026), two tons of pine tree resin poured on the floor to produce a luminous pool, materializes the encounter with the sublime that Rilke describes. A protective toxin, wound sealant, and industrial material for biofuels, pine resin is something of a pharmakon: an embodiment of generative and destructive forces that the wall text relates to Jakob Senneby’s multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune condition in which the nervous system attacks itself. In both cases, landscape and body encompass contradictory conditions: an oscillation that “You must change your life” traces across five sections, starting with the volcanic rocks from Jeju Island that appear throughout as gauges of deep yet present time. Each is a portal, given the place rocks have in East Asia, from suseok to gongshi (also known as scholar’s rocks): natural forms selected and often enhanced by humans as objects for contemplating one’s part in an ineffable whole. They also invoke Jeju 4.3: the April 1948 uprising on the island against Korea’s division and US occupation, and the brutal military response that South Korea’s government only apologized for in 2003—events that resonate with the state violence inflicted on Gwangju’s protestors and citizens in 1980, and the years of silence that ensued.
Fragments are both limits and expansions. Take Kiri Dalena’s Erased Slogans (2008–ongoing), more than 130 photographs of Philippine demonstrations from the 1950s to the ’70s with placard slogans digitally erased, installed in section one, “Molecules and Me,” opposite Sasaki Ken’s List (2024), a small painting of a notebook referencing Sasaki’s father’s involvement in the Japanese University Uprising of 1968–69. Or Amanda Heng’s Another Woman in Gwangju 1996, 2014, 2023 (2026): photos of Heng and her mother spanning three decades presented in section two, “Bodies and Bonds.” That visceral interplay of continuity and rupture expands from the familial to the artistic in a capsule on Ullimsanbang, a century-spanning South Jeolla artistic tradition, from founder Sochi Huh Ryeon’s 1890 ink-on-paper suseok diptych Goeseokdo (literally: “Painting of Strange Rocks”) to Huh Moon’s minimalist accumulations of ink wash and negative space on paper from the 2010s. These are presented in the following section, “Landscapes and Learning,” alongside tea-themed ink paintings by Huh Baek-ryun. Huh co-founded the Gwangju Agricultural Technical High School in 1947, the year before the North and South governments were formed, on the basis that art is inseparable from community; he helped support it by selling paintings and cultivating spring snow tea on Mount Mudeung, whose name translates to indivisibility by rank. The tea is served in a gallery overlooking a garden through a window wall, connecting suseok and its animist resonances with shanshui landscapes, where representations of the land function as meditations on interworldly relations.
That multidimensionality continues in Maya Watanabe’s single-channel video installation Liminal (2019) and CAMP’s seven-channel video tapestry, Bombay Tilts Down (2022). Viewed on a tilted screen within a cavernous nook, the former scans terrain marked by crimes committed during Peru’s internal armed conflict from 1980 to 2000. The latter is presented like a scroll across hanging screens, with CCTV images recorded from a Mumbai high-rise weaving top-down and bottom-up views of a sharply divided city, as a song describes bricks workers made from mud and mortar to build palaces reaching the sky. Geological time thus weaves into political time. That reality reverberates across generations and geographies: the full accounting of people killed or missing in relation to May 1980 in Gwangju remains unresolved, just as thousands are still missing from Peru’s internal conflict.
Hence the need to not only retell history but find forms capable of expressing its complexity without collapsing into ornamentation. The “Cosmos and Change” section navigates that problem poetically. Installed on a monumental screen at the back of a darkened hall, Saodat Ismailova’s enigmatic video portrait of eighth-century prophet-rebel Al-Muqanna, Melted into the Sun (2024), conducts a powerful video chorus with soundtracks harmonizing across open space to create a curatorial score—from Bhenji Ra’s single-channel Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon (2024), following the artist’s personal encounter with pangalay, a dance practiced among the Tausug of the Sulu Archipelago, to Sohrab Hura’s The Coast (2019), following Kali worshippers reveling in the night sea in Tamil Nadu. Known as “the Veiled One,” Al-Muqanna, played by Uzbek poet Jontemir Jondor, moves across rivers and deserts, perching on archaeological and Soviet-era constructions, as his companions refract the sun with mirrors. Voices whisper ancient questions: “Who had plunged us into the vortex of endless repetition?” and “Where is our will?”
Wang Tuo confronts those queries in Chapters 1 and 3 of Critical Theory of Absence (2026–ongoing), presented on back-to-back screens in a black box. Commissioned for the Biennale, Chapter 3, Ratchet Drill (2026), follows young people rehearsing a play ostensibly based on the Gwangju Uprising, though details remain vague enough for the story to resonate with other state-suppressed liberation movements. Caught in what feels like limbo, footage of a terrified young soldier clutching his gun in the chaos is spliced with scenes of him at home alone holding a pistol to his head. In the end, the revolutionaries bow in silence to an empty theater, suspended by the gravity of liberation in practice. It’s a haunting gesture in times and places like these, recalling the line in Rilke’s poem that precedes its famous imperative: “for here there is no place / that does not see you.”
