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Intentionally Smaller and Slower, the 16th Gwangju Biennale Traces a Path of Change

Curated around themes of gradual transformation and interdependence, the show favors sustained engagement with fewer artists over the more expansive survey format now common among biennials.

“You Must Change Your Life” is the title of the 16th Gwangju Biennale, which runs through November 15 and asks us to radically reconsider the way we look at our position in the world, considering the possibilities from individual and collective life to the broader ecosystem of relations between human and nonhuman beings, and ultimately to the cosmic ensemble of interdependence and interconnection. Led by artist Ho Tzu Nyen alongside curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee and Brian Kuan Wood, as well as assistant curators Lee Yein and Koyuri Sato, the biennial brings together 43 artists—an intentionally contained number compared with other recent exhibitions, giving individual works more space to expand and visitors more time to spend with them. As their names recur on the wall texts mounted through the Gwangju Biennale’s five galleries, the artists gradually become familiar, like traveling companions on a journey toward new levels of awareness.

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In contrast with the biennialization phenomenon of recent years, which has often followed a logic of expansion, Ho and his team wanted to explore the intensity of attention, he explained during the opening press conference. The format is an attempt to achieve sustainability, not just ecologically, but also a sustainability of attention. “Rather than moving rapidly from one artist to the next, we wanted to spend more time with practices that have themselves been formed over years, sometimes decades, of sustained artistic attention and repetition,” he explained. “A large exhibition typically turns artists into dots. One artist, one work, one moment of attention, and you move on. We wanted instead to follow lines. A practice is a line through time.”

The biennial takes its title from the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (1908), which came to Ho after a particularly intense period. “You must change your life” sounds urgent, even forceful, yet the Gwangju Biennale approaches change not as a destination but as a method. The idea of repetition is central to the exhibition, which moves away from the idea of change as a single dramatic event, crisis, conversion or catastrophe. Much of our lives is shaped by what we do repeatedly: choices that become habits and practices, producing fundamental transformation over time through exercise, discipline, work, reversal, cultivation, attention and repetition. “Change does not exist at one speed,” Ho explained. “We tend to think of change as rupture, and change can certainly be explosive, but it can also be so slow and continuous that we barely perceive it.”

Equally significant is the decision to include nonhuman presences among the artists’ works, further extending both the philosophical and temporal perspective. Groups of volcanic rocks from Jeju appear across the galleries and are positioned almost as participating artists themselves: metaphors for the progressive transformations unfolding in nature, and reminders that creation existed long before human authorship.

Five galleries, five dimensions of change

This curatorial vision translates into an extremely clear exhibition structure: five galleries conceived not simply as five thematic sections but as five different modes, scales, landscapes and atmospheres.

The first is “Molecules and Me,” exploring the individual yet potentially expansive and always dynamic dimension of our existence as molecules and particles. The human presence is at the center: images and sculptures of bodies, of individuals confronting the very physical but intrinsically interdependent dimension of existing and moving through the world. The human figure here reveals itself as dependent upon and acted upon by materials, landscapes, political systems, biological processes and other bodies.

At the entrance we have our first encounter with what becomes a recurring presence through the rooms: the work of Sasaki Ken, here with rippled surfaces suggesting the infinitely expansive, ever-changing nature of the desert, and a nebulous sky that could depict the infinity of the cosmos but also portrays human disaster in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. As we proceed through the rooms, his paintings move from particles to the hyperrealism of daily objects, exploring the different scales through which we can conceive our existence. “There is no single word that tells us what Sasaki Ken’s practice means. Meaning instead accumulates through recurrence. You see something, move away from it, encounter the artist again later,” Ho said.

At the center of the room, Goldin Senneby’s Resin Pond (2026) spreads nearly two tons of luminous pine resin across the floor, forming a glassy amber pool that is visually seductive but physically obstructive, and potentially poisonous. The work draws from Jakob Senneby’s experience of living with multiple sclerosis, a chronic autoimmune condition in which the body’s defense mechanisms attack the nervous system they are meant to protect. The installation invites us to contemplate the fragile systems by which life protects and sustains itself but can also potentially turn against itself.

Around this toxic pond are Jean Barth’s life-size hybrid sculptures, inspired in part by the casts of victims preserved after the eruption of Vesuvius at Pompeii. Shaped by her transgender experience but extending beyond autobiography, the work approaches the body as something socially, politically and materially unstable. Their sculptural presence hovers between physical and virtual origins, having emerged through 3D modeling, performance capture and printed self-portraits as digital avatars, staging the unstable nature of today’s living experience between the digital and the sensorial.

A sense of loneliness and isolation emerges from Wang Jiajiao’s life-size painted bodies: a contemporary return to social realism with scenes of couples and families interacting, where the subjects are together but already crossed by distance, subtly detached from one another, suspended in the low-level alienation of contemporary life.

On large suspended screens comes our first encounter with Saodat Ismailova, an Uzbek artist we will meet repeatedly through the exhibition. In Zukhra (2013), a life-size sleeping girl appears suspended between dimensions, sleep and wakefulness, life and death. Her heartbeat fills the space, drawing us into dreams and into the blurred historical memories passing through them: forgotten ancestors, the Soviet construction of Uzbekistan as a nation-state and the Hujum campaign, which turned women’s bodies into political terrain.

Also recurring through the show is the narrative of Kiri Dalena, as she confronts the fragility of individual fates as they become interlaced with political and economic systems. In Life Masks (2013-), she photographs activists, cultural workers and families affected by state violence wearing plaster casts of their own faces, often within domestic spaces. The white masks erase identity but create another form of portraiture that allows us to contemplate their shared destinies as victims of the same systems.

There are relatively few paintings in the exhibition. Among them are Rim Dong Sik’s portrayals of humans immersed in landscape, drawing from his performances over the past five decades as he tests ways of extending the body into nature, dissolving the boundary between artist and environment.

Rossella Biscotti similarly treats matter as a living document, expanding the idea of portraiture beyond the represented body. The first works we encounter in Gallery 1 are luminescent imprinted latex sheets evoking women from colonial-era Indonesia. The work draws inspiration from Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet (Tetralogi Buru, 1980-1988), composed orally while the writer was imprisoned on Buru Island under President Suharto’s regime. Their materiality carries history, as the Dutch East Indies became a major site of colonial rubber production.

Screening in an alcove, Maya Watanabe’s Liminal takes us into the aftermath of Peru’s armed conflict, moving between geological scale and anthropogenic violence. Approximately 70,000 people were killed, but Watanabe narrows that abstraction to a fragment of human bone and, behind it, to an individual whose identity may still remain unresolved. The landscape becomes a terrible field of transformation: body into earth, earth into evidence, evidence into identity and, potentially, identity into memory.

Across Gallery 1, boundaries continually lose their stability: body and landscape, self and other,........

© Observer