10 Standout Artists at the 14th Gwangju Biennale
Yuko Mohri, installation view of I/O, 2011–23, in “soft and weak like water” at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, 2023. Courtesy of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
As a recurring art event, the Gwangju Biennale carries a heavy burden: to deal with the legacy and trauma of the democratic uprising and the massacre that followed in the city in May 1980, a recent historical event that has not reached its closure. Indeed, only a week before the opening, a grandson of the now-deceased South Korean dictator paid an unexpected visit to Gwangju, a city 270 kilometers away from the country’s capital. He flew in from the United States to confess the wrongdoings of his family and apologize to the victims of the massacre in public, stirring the citizens of Gwangju to reflect on their memories of the incident.
Indeed, the Gwangju Biennale was inaugurated in 1995 under the country’s first democratically elected president after decades of military dictatorship, as a way to commemorate the event. This year’s artistic director, Sook-kyung Lee, who also serves as the senior curator of international art at Tate Modern, said that she also wanted the participating artists to “understand where the biennial came from” and not to “touch upon very slightly or on the surface” of the issue of direct actions’s importance for liberation movements.
Yuki Kihara, Song About Sāmoa—Moana (Pacific), 2022. Photo by glimworkers. Courtesy of the artist and Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
The 14th iteration of the Gwangju Biennale, “soft and weak like water,” borrows its title from a line in Tao Te Ching with an emphasis on the water’s capacity to permeate seemingly impenetrable things. The exhibition, which comprises the main exhibition hall building, four satellite venues, and nine additional national pavilions, proposes a planetary yet local perspective on what art means in our time of automated and enhanced bias, division, and conflict. With 79 artists and collectives from predominantly non-Western or Global South countries, this year’s biennial offers in part a view of artistic practices that have been disregarded by a Western, Eurocentric perspective.
As such, one might consider “soft and weak like water” as an exhibition that fulfills its title both in positive and negative ways. But true to its reference to a Taoist classic Tao Te Jing, the biennial nudges the viewers to expand their view of today’s world, by juxtaposing practices of so-called “indigenous” origin with a mediated reflection on the sufferings that took place in its host city, Gwangju.
Here are some of the artists from this year’s Gwangju Biennale who deal with the complexities of different histories through artistic practice and speak to the conditions of our time.
Pangrok Sulap
Pangrok Sulap, installation view of Gwangju Blooming, 2023, in “soft and weak like water” at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, 2023. Photo by glimworkers. Courtesy Pangrok Sulap and Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
In Malaysian, Pangrok Sulap means a “punk rock hut.” Established in 2010 with the slogan “Jangan Beli, Bikin Sendiri” (“Don’t buy, do it yourself”) as a collective of artists, musicians, and social activists, Pangrok Sulap collect various indigenous narratives in rural areas and make woodcut prints through collective wood carving, followed by communal dancing with the music they perform. For this year’s biennial, the collective engaged with the narrative of Gwangju as a city of uprising for democracy and focused on the strong tradition of woodcut printing in Korea’s democratic movement. As a result, the collective produced a series of woodcut prints on large banners that are reminiscent of those used by students and activists during the 1970s and 1980s to protest dictatorial regimes. The images on the banners depict archival images of the democratic uprising and scenes of contemporary lives of the citizens, referencing past struggles and questioning how they resonate with the contemporary conditions.
Aliza Nisenbaum, installation view in “soft and weak like water” at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
Often, the less-told stories in major historical events, including those from the uprising in Gwangju, reemerge through theater. Aliza Nisenbaum’s new paintings depict moments of the theater performance Someday in Spring (2010) by Gwangju’s local troupe Shinmyeong, mediating the trauma and loss from May 18th victims, survivors, and citizens at large.Once a psychology student who aspired to be a social worker, Nisenbaum creates portraits of mainly underrepresented social groups as “painting from life.” In her portraits in oil, traditionally the medium of rich and powerful, her subjects reclaim their place in art history.
By visiting Gwangju and engaging with the theater troupe, including studying their four decades of activities in the region, Nisenbaum brings forth the voices of those affected by the massacre that still resonate today in the works on display. As she explained, her observations on the theater troupe led her to feel “a sense of closure”—perhaps a sign that future work may take a different approach.
Oum Jeongsoon
Oum Jeongsoon, installation view of Elephant without trunk, 2023, in “soft and weak like water” at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
Active as a visual artist based in Korea since the late 1980s, Oum Jeongsoon didn’t enjoy the limelight in the contemporary art circuit. Her abstract line drawings are often seen as a type of observation, but it was her active engagement with people with visual impairment that drove her practice to a more expansive level. In 1996, Oum had a chance to teach art to students at a school for the blind, which led her to establish Another Way of Seeing, a nonprofit organization to support visually impaired children, students, and artists to engage art education and production.
Oum’s four tactile installations of elephant figures in different shapes, which won her the inaugural Park Seo-bo Art Prize of $100,000, are the result of her decades-long involvement with visually impaired children since 2009. The work revolves around the Buddhist parable of the blind men and an elephant, where the animal is described as different shapes and textures by each blind man. The touchable installations in the biennial are in different shapes, gesturing to the many different ways of sensing visual cues beyond vision.
Soun-gui Kim, installation view of Gwangju. Poems, 2023, in “soft and weak like water” at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, 2023. Photo by glimworkers. Courtesy of the artist and Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
Gwangju. Poems (2023) is a four-channel video installation produced in collaboration with students at a local girls’ high school reciting poems written by women writers of Joseon, a dynastic kingdom that lasted until the late 19th century. With keen interest in language, as a Korean immigrant artist to France, Kim gives another life to the old voices of women writers through those of a younger generation. As the poems are composedly recited against the backdrop of footage showing surging waves, the language of the past gains new vitality through those who will live through the future. By indirectly speaking to the most pressing issues of our time, Kim’s work suggests a poetic meditation on how we can live on art’s expressive power to be renewed at all times in every generation.
ikkibawiKrrr
ikkibawiKrrr, installation view in “soft and weak like water” at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, 2023. Photo by glimworkers. Courtesy of the artists and Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
Established in 2021 as a “visual research band,” ikkibawiKrrr is a collective of three intergenerational Korean artists: Jungwon Kim, Jieun Cho, and Gyeol Ko. This year’s Gwangju Biennale marks the belated Korean debut of Tropical Story (2022), a rhythmical two-channel video installation that revisits islands along the Pacific Ocean that have been used by colonial powers for military and extractive activities.
First exhibited at Kassel’s Museum of Natural History of Ottoneum as part of documenta 15, where the work referenced the broader context of colonialism, here, it speaks to the idea of “Transient Sovereignty,” one of the biennial’s five chapters. As the video depicts the now-defunct facilities on tropical islands being taken over by nature over the years, memorial monuments, graves, and shrines remind us of the residue of ongoing trauma from the past. The recurring theme of water, which also permeates many works in the biennial, gives the work a perspective on the shared experience of history from different times and regions on the planetary level.
Meiro Koizumi, installation view of Theater of Life, 2023, in “soft and weak like water” at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, 2023. Photo by glimworkers. Courtesy the artist and Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
A feast of five unsynced video channels, Theater of Life (2023) offers a look at the lives of Koryo-in (Korean diaspora in Central Asia) community in Gwangju. As Koreans who moved or fled to Manchuria in the 19th century and were forced to migrate to Central Asia in the early 20th century, the Koryo-in community in Gwangju appears neither entirely domestic, nor entirely foreign.
Meiro Koizumi, known for his performative videos that deal with the personal and the historical, took on tracing the history of Koryo Theater, a theater for Soviet Koreans in Kazakhstan established during the rule of Stalin. In the video, 15 Koryo-in youths who are adapting to Gwangju as their new home take part in a workshop with the artist, staging theatrical scenes based on the photo documentation of the theater in Kazakhstan, an important institution for the Koryo-in population in the region. The five overlapping video channels show young people who are seemingly “Asian” or “Korean,” but carry much more complex origins and histories they are born with.
Installation view of “soft and weak like water” at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, 2023. Courtesy of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
Sculptures in Guadalupe Maravilla’s “Disease Thrower” series (2019–present) do not only exist as altar-like installations that exhume the artist’s ethnic and cultural background. Instead, Maravilla considers these works as “healing machines” through which he soothes untreated traumas from himself and others and learns about healing practices from different cultures. Part artwork and part instrument for healing, the intricate installations speak to the artist’s Central American ancestry, genealogies of displacement, and his personal experience of healing from cancer.
Carrying the power of healing, they need to be activated before they are presented in public, which often becomes a ritual of sorts—in Gwangju, the works were activated through an hour-long process. Coupled with the “Embroidery” series (2019), which depicts emblems of resistance to oppression of undocumented immigrants, the installations aptly remind the viewers of both the possibility of healing and concurrent struggles.
Anne Duk Hee Jordan
Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Octopus Garden, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
While the main exhibition building of “soft and weak like water” presents artworks more carefully, the four satellite venues are places to unleash more bold undertakings. Berlin-based artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s whole ecosystem of robots occupy the entire basement floor of Horanggasy Artpolygon, as part of her “Artificial Stupidity” series (2016–present). This installation (whose title is a quote from Douglas Adams’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, spoken by dolphins migrating off planet Earth) hints at an impending end of the world as we know it. Yet the work does not merely suggest a doomsday scenario. Taking its cues also from James Lovelock’s optimistic outlook of humanity in Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, the artist offers a space occupied by non-human entities moving on their own and interrupted by their human visitors.
Yuki Kihara
Yuki Kihara, installation view of A Song About Sāmoa—Moana (Pacific), 2022, in “soft and weak like water” at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, 2023. Photo by glimworkers. Courtesy of the artist and Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
What happens when a museum of artifacts is occupied by a contemporary art biennial? And then what happens when the biennial places what looks like traditional crafts into the display? New Zealand artist Yuki Kihara is of Japanese and Sāmoan descent, combining the traditional Sāmoan cloth siapo and Japanese kimono as her artistic material. If you weren’t looking at what’s on display at the Gwangju National Museum as part of the biennial, one might take Kihara’s contribution as part of the museum’s permanent collection, due to its traditional-looking handmade cloth.
However, the work presents urgent and pressing issues in her native area. The beautiful cloth with oceanscape reveals various extractive means employed by foreign powers in pursuit of ruthless struggles to occupy more natural resources and geopolitical advantage against their competitors. The combination of contemporary imagery with traditional material and symbols is also in line with the overall curatorial direction of “soft and weak like water” where the issues of our time are mediated not only through newly invented contemporary art forms, but also through traditional expressive means: crafts, which have a long history of being excluded as art, per se.
Yuko Mohri, installation view of I/O, 2011–23, in “soft and weak like water” at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, 2023. Courtesy of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
Yuko Mohri, installation view of I/O, 2011–23, in “soft and weak like water” at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, 2023. Courtesy of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
Inspired by Han Kang’s novel The White Book, at the Gwangju Biennale, Yuko Mohri restages her installation I/O (2011–23). The work represents a responsive, organic ecosystem, made up of objects collected in Gwangju that “reads” the environment of the exhibition space as musical score. For Mohri, Han Kang’s novel allowed her to access stories of oppressed people that have been previously lost. The novel is not necessarily a coherent narrative depicting a particular historical event. Rather, it is a fragmentary, poetic meditation on life and death and the past and the present.
I/O, she said, narrates a “tone of history that was never written before” without words, but by animating objects, using the sound they generate, and reverberation of air. In the same way that the biennial’s theme “soft and weak like water” offers a way into the difficult issue of truth and reconciliation, Mohri’s work expands into a planetary perspective that is more contemplative if not poetic.