Highlights from Gwangju Biennale 2018: "Imagined Borders," Part 1
By HG Masters
Sunjung Kim (center, speaking) with the Gwangju Biennale
Set in a quiet, sprawling city in the southwestern corner of South Korea, the Gwangju Biennale 2018 is a polyphony. With seven main exhibitions, 11 curators, 165 artists from 43 countries, and, new to this edition, a series of “collateral” pavilions organized by third parties, the 2018 Gwangju Biennale is almost an anachronism—maximalist in a way that harkens back to earlier days of art-world festivalism, when quantity and breadth of representation was the compelling reason for the biennial format in the first place. Indeed, these are characteristics that are inherent to the institution since its founding, as Gwangju Biennale Foundation’s new president, Sunjung Kim, explains in her introductory catalogue text. The 12th edition of the Gwangju Biennale consciously looks back at the inaugural show in 1995, which was titled “Beyond the Borders” and came during South Korea’s “Year of Art” to celebrate the country’s new globalization agenda, as well as to serve as a memorial to Gwangju’s May 18th Democratic Uprising in 1980. That inaugural edition had seven sections, each examining a different geographical region and helmed by its own curator, as well as special exhibitions focusing on “Info Art,” 1990s Korean art and the Gwangju Uprising. This year, again, there are seven sections focusing not on regions but topics that span and define the world today: the legacy of modernist architecture and urbanism in the global South; the hardening of borders amid huge waves of global migration and refugee crises; the insidious and marvelous variety of self-surveillance and information technologies; racial and identity politics; the collapsing of boundaries between nature and humanity, plus a section devoted to reprising the history of the Biennial itself, and one devoted to the contemporary chosonhwa (ink wash) paintings of North Korean artists—a curatorial nod to the newfound potential for political change and reconciliation on the Korean peninsula.
