(Left) Mike Nelson, Mirror reverb (the blinding of a building, a notation for another), 2018; installation view at Imagined Borders, 12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; Matt’s Gallery, London; neugerriemschneider, Berlin. (Right) Kader Attia, Shifting Borders, 2018; installation view at Imagined Borders, 12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018. Courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin, Galerie Nagel Draxler, and Gwangju Biennale Foundation.
The third part of our “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning: the 13th Gwangju Biennale” article series takes us away from the main biennale locations and looks at the Gwangju Biennale Commission (GB Commission), the Pavilion Project and the MaytoDay exhibition.
Gwangju Biennale Commission 2021
The GB Commission was first presented in 2018 by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation to question the social role of art and test the Biennale’s capacity to sustain itself. With the 13th edition of the Gwangju Biennale, the GB Commission takes place across a number of historical sites that hold particular significance for the May 18 Democratization Movement. The locations include the Former Armed Forces’ Gwangju Hospital and the Asia Cultural Center (ACC).
Founded in in the mid-1960s, the hospital treated the students and civilians who were tortured during the May 18 Democratization Movement in 1980. Despite its status as a historical May18 memorial site, the hostpital has been left in ruins ever since the institution relocated to Hampyeong in 2007. The site will be turned into a trauma centre in the near future, thus this year might present the last opportunity for artists to engage with the space, its memory and the imagination of its past, present and future.
The 13th Gwangju Biennale new commissions are presented alongside two previous GB Commission installations, restaged for the occasion: Kader Attia’s Shifting Border (2018) and Mike Nelson’s Mirror reverb (the blinding of a building, a notation for another) (2018). Kader Attia’s 2018 GB Commission, a three-channel video installation, employs multidisciplinary approaches to explore traditional structures of healing and coping with political traumatic experiences. Mike Nelson’s 2018 work plays with the history of the site, and by using component parts of the hospital, weaves the sense of absence in the vacant buildings, and the memory of time and history with the tangible presence of the ruins.
Korean artist Sung Hwan Kim’s Hair is a piece of head (2021) is the first part of A Record of Drifting Across the Sea, a multi-part research work of short films, books and installations that looks at undocumented Korean immigrant histories at the turn of the 20th century in the United States.
Presented at ACC Creation Space 5, the film centres on Hawaii as a place and a concept, a site that for centuries has represented a point of immigrant crossing across the Pacific, and historically the first land encountered by migrants travelling this ocean route.
While connecting with the May 18 Uprising in Gwangju, the work quotes the oral documentation of Korean picture brides and their descendants, who tried to change their appearance in order to avoid hate crimes during Japan/US adversities. At the same time, the artist also closes in on the delicate situation of the kānaka maoli, Native Hawaiians. The film, spoken in English, Korean and Hawaiian, attempts to weave through different subjectivities embedded in different languages.
Korean Minouk Lim’s story is much closer to home, one that embodies the lingering traces of a traumatic past, while telling a tale of resilience and giving a voice to people’s testimonies. Mr. Eui Jin Chai and 1,000 Canes (2014 and 2020) is an installation at the Hospital that tells the story of Chai Eui Jin, a survivor of a massacre of unarmed civilians just before the Korean War. The man fought for the investigation of the truth of the massacre until his death in 2016. Chai collected the roots and branches that are the canes in the installation throughout his lifetime. They not only represent his despair and sorrow, but also signify the trajectory of the historical lessons of other events of the last century of Korean history.
Singaporean Ho Tzu Nyen’s The 49th Hexagram (2020) is two-channel animation that draws on the history of 革命 (gémìng) — the Chinese term for ‘revolution’. 命 is s life, destiny and mandate, while 革 evokes change, with a tinge of bloodshed. The work, presented at ACC, looks at the May 18 movement and its significance against the backdrop of the other numerous uprisings during the last century of Korean history.
As the title suggests, Ho uses the 49th Hexagram, a section of the ancient Chinese divinatory text the I-Ching, in which the earliest known appearance of the character 革 can be found. The hexagram appears alongside images of uprisings from South Korean movies, TV shows and historical photographs, to question the past while also pointing to the still-present political sensitivies.
Japan’s Chiharu Shiota brings her trademark red threads to the Gwangju historical hospital site’s chapel. Taking inspiration from the Christian mission that arrived in Japan in the 16th century, Shiota’s The Language of God (2020) embraces the lives of those who wadesd through the period of the Democratization Movement, by creating an intricate entanglement of yarn and Bible pages that permeate the spiritual and physical space of the chapel.
Part of the GB Commission 2020/2021 are also Bae Young-hwan’s Pop Song: March for the Beloved (1997-2021), Lee Bul’s Aubade V (2019) and “Civitas Solis” series (2015/2021), and Tarek Atoui’s The Elemental Set (2021-2022).
Pavilion Project 2021
The Pavilion Project, also initiated in 2018, has partnered with the Kunsthaus Pasquart in Switzerland and Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB) in Taiwan to present two projects at the 13th Gwangju Biennale.
The Swiss Pavilion Project titled ALONE TOGETHER is a performative piece and visual installation by the Swiss choreographer Anna Anderegg at the Eunam Museum of Arts. Anderegg’s practice explores the interdependence of the human body and its habitat. Here she works with a team of artists from Europe and South Korea to perform a networked space through which the audience can wander freely. Through a performance and a film, Anderegg investigates the narcotic distractions of technology, consumerism and celebrity culture.
Anderegg and three female dancers explore complex individual interactions, virtual connectivity and isolation in urban, digital or socially constructed environments. Performing in an abstract space and a complex five-hour looped time structure, the work resonates ever more powerfully in the current pandemic.
Curated by Wu Dar-Kuen, the collaborative project Double Echoing presented at ACC features 14 Taiwanese and Korean artist. Using art, the project explores the democratic developments and pursuit of human rights, freedom and
universal values in both Taiwan and South Korea. The exhibition examines the development of
two Asian democracies whose histories bear close resemblance.
(Left) Wang Ding-Yeh, My dear, kiss me and goodbye, 2020. Image courtesy the artist and C-LAB. (Right) Jung Yeondoo, Noise Quartet 2019, 4 channel videos with sound, 2019. Photo LIN Guan-Ming. Image courtesy C-LAB.
MaytoDay: Between the Seen and the Spoken
“MaytoDay” is a durational, multi-sited exhibition project initiated in 2020 and organised by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the May 18 Democratization Movement. “MaytoDay” connects Gwangju citizens’ struggle for democracy to the history of Gwangju Biennale itself, and more notably, to other countries and cultures’ resistance movements. “MaytoDay” addresses the contemporary resonance of South Korea’s civil resistance history by situating the historic event in a transnational context. The project unfolds across four cities — Taipei, Seoul, Cologne, and Buenos Aires — each in partnership with local institutions and curators. Traversing between the local and the global, these exhibitions were re-grouped and presented in “Maytoday” in Gwangju in Autumn 2020 and will subsequently be in Venice during the Architecture Biennale in 2021.
By bringing together these divergent, yet entangled narratives, the organisers hope to cast a new light on “the historicized event of the past in light of the current social and political landscape, questioning, among others, what it means to remember, record, intervene and imagine the making of democracy”.
The “MaytoDay” exhibition at the Gwangju Biennale titled “Between the Seen and the Spoken” is curated by Lee Sun and Sooyoung Leam, and features the work of thirteen artists born or based in Gwangju who engage with the historic site of the Former Armed Forces’ Gwangju Hospital. The artists temporarily overtake the building’s empty spaces on the ground floor, visualising what could be seen and heard if we looked and listened closely. The artists highlight “the residual textures of the site, where traces of history and memory, pain and recovery, violence and resistance overlap”, responding to the context and the May 18 movement on their own terms and from today’s standpoint. Presenting a range of artworks, from painting to installation and performance, the artists in the show include Shin Yonggu, Moon Seonhee, Jeong Jeongju, Cheng Seonhooi, Choi Kichang, Park Hwayeon, Lee Insung, Kang Un, Kim Seola, Song Philyong, Lim Namjin, Lee Sehyun and Lee Yeonsook.
Shin Yonggu explores the meaning of life embedded in the cycles of nature through performance. The artist presents an opening performance to the exhibition, which plays with the concept of the invisible, non-human beings we believe in and often fear. The dampness of the shade and the dryness ofthe sunlight cast across the gardens of the hospital stand as symbols of our memories about this time and place. The opening piece, The Garden of Memory Blossoms, seeks to console us not as an act of ritual, but as a performance of peace and hope residing in our everyday life.
Lee Yeonsook’s installation On ne sait Jamais (2020) is a thin layer of white clay smeared across the hospital’s floor with old objects placed on it. While the clay changes and mutates, peeling off and drying with the shifting temperatures, the objects appear like rusted waste material or unearthed archeological artefacts. These are in fact metal casts of mangrove tree pieces, displayed alongside parts used during the casting and normally thrown away after the process. The installation visibilises processes that often unseen, as well as the past and memories of a space in mutation. As the curators explain, “By bringing to surface aspects of life that often go unnoticed, the installation acts as a passage of recollection and re-presentation.”
At the end of the hospital’s corridor lies a room veiled in twilight dusk, with piles of ash quietly hiding untild stories. Ashes can move with the slightest gust of wind, they come and go, they exist everywhere and anywhere. The installation Come and Go by Park Hwayeon activates the movements of jae, or ashes (which could also mean ‘repeat’ or ‘to be here’ in Korean) through a projection. The artist transforms the room into a site of mourning, where past and present collide.
Jeong Jeongju’s installation directly engages with the hospital’s architeture, and plays with concepts of time and space, weaving past and present together in one single landscape. A large room hosts the artist’s scaled-down architectural model of the Former Armed Forces’ Gwangju Hospital, which is constantly captured by a panning camera installed inside the space. Simultaneously, projections on the wall show what the camera is filming, thereby including any visitors in its moving images. Viewers are thus both part of a present, a reality that is tangible to them, and part of a past, albeit ‘just now past’, projected onto the walls of the space they inhabit. The artist brings into play the real and the virtual realms, past and present, and the minds and the spirits that live in between these zones. The installation allows for a new experience, regeneration and re-imagining of the landscape.
Providing a lighter, airy atmosphere, Moon Seonhee’s slope corridor installation Un/ asked – Voice blooms brings a quiet, meditative garden inside the heavily charged walls of the hospital. With so many visually darker works, the artist’s blooming greenery offers a breath of fresh air, even while belying a more somber reality: that of the May 18 movement experienced by children at the time. Even the location of the installation has a sort of symbolic association, as it once led up to the intensive care unit on the second floor, thus perhaps providing a metaphor of a link between life and death, and rebirth. Moon has turned the slope into a garden of oxeye daisies, a medical plant used as herbal treatment. The feeble, delicate daisies echo the youthful voices of children filling up the space.
Moon has reconnnected to 1980s Gwangju through a series of interviews with 80 people who were children during the May 18 period. Even though they experienced the uprising, they were never regarded as official testimonies because they were too young. The intimate memories of these now-middle-aged adults gain vitality through the innocent voices of children living in Gwangju today, as they recite parts of the transcribed interviews. Sitting on a solitary chair within this quiet landscape, we can close our eyes, listen and breathe.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
Click here for ” Rising, Spirits Tuning: the 13th Gwangju Biennale — Part 1“
Click here for “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning: the 13th Gwangju Biennale — Part 2”
Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning: the 13th Gwangju Biennale runs from 1 April to 9 May 2021 at different locations in Gwangju, Korea, and on social media platforms and the Biennale website.