Robert Nava
Creatures in Flux
First held in 1995 in the aftermath of the May 18 Democratization Movement, the Gwangju Biennale has grown into one of Asia’s most significant exhibitions of contemporary art. In May 1980, citizens rose up against South Korea’s military government and were violently suppressed by the state. The uprising later became an important reference point for the country’s democratic movement, and its history remains part of the context in which the biennale takes place.
For its 16th edition, the Gwangju Biennale is led by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen as Artistic Director, working with curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee and Brian Kuan Wood on a presentation of 43 artists and collectives, the smallest number the biennale has brought together to date. Its theme, You Must Change Your Life, comes from the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” For Ho, this raises a question about what art can do, and whether a work can change the way we see the world. PLUS spoke with Ho about the idea behind this edition, and what it might mean to rethink the biennale itself at a time when the format is increasingly being called into question.
PLUS I’d like to begin our conversation with your role as Artistic Director for this biennale. I imagine directing one and participating in one may offer a different perspective, but I’m curious how much of your own way of working has carried over.
HO TZU NYEN Yes. My working process is often a kind of rearrangement of existing works, discourses and ideas — trying to form new combinations out of what already exists. In that sense, I approached the biennale in much the same way.
Coming into this role, I operated very much as an artist, rather than pretending to be a curator. The curatorial and exhibition teams created a process in which I could work as an artist and feel comfortable being myself, and that shaped this edition.
There are two key words for us: change and practice. It is no coincidence that we ended up focusing on artists’ practices. Hopefully, this edition presents not just works, but practices — not only what an artist has made, but the larger processes of repetition, transformation and thought from which the works emerge.
P And thinking about Gwangju, and Korea more broadly, you’ve worked with the biennale several times, and you’ve also had a relationship with Korea for some time now.
HTN I have done maybe four or five projects in the city of Gwangju. Three of them were for the biennale itself, across two editions — one of those editions held two separate projects. So there is definitely some degree of familiarity. Working with the biennale on new productions was not always straightforward, partly because of bureaucratic and administrative processes. That experience mattered when working on this edition. I wanted the artists coming into it to have a smoother experience. We did not manage to change everything we wanted, or improve artists’ financial conditions as much as we had hoped, but I think we made substantial improvements with the Gwangju Biennale Foundation’s help.
I do not think one consciously reflects on one’s relationship with a country. But now that I am tasked with the Gwangju Biennale, I have started to feel that all my past experiences in Korea were precious. They add up as a kind of aggregate. Even in my earliest encounters here, there were certainly dimensions of the culture that were new to me, but I also always felt an affinity.
P Affinity in…
HTN I am Singaporean, but ethnically Chinese, and there was a certain Confucian lineage in my family upbringing. That inheritance runs through Singapore more broadly as well, although in a very diffuse and transformed way. Perhaps because of this, I felt certain resonances with Korea — even with some of its bureaucratic aspects, which have their own forms of ritual, hierarchy and procedure.
But I also like the word “affinity” because it has another history. In chemistry, affinity describes the tendency of certain substances to combine with others. And I inevitably think of Goethe’s great title, Elective Affinities, where that chemical idea becomes a way of thinking about human relations. The word “elective” matters to me: affinity is not only something we inherit; sometimes it is also something we choose — what we move towards, what we align ourselves with. Perhaps that is what I mean by affinity here: something we recognise, but also something we choose to deepen.
P I’d like to turn to the biennale itself for a moment. Its connection to May 18 goes back to its founding. But each edition also has to speak to the moment you’re in. What are your thoughts on the role of the biennale in carrying that history while responding to the present, and was that also something that came into your thinking around the theme, You Must Change Your Life?
HTN Yes, very much. In our public statements, we refer to Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, whose final line gives us the title. But what attracted me to You Must Change Your Life is that, with or without Rilke, it is extremely evocative on its own. It sounds like a command, but it does not tell you what to do, how to change, or what you must become. That openness is important. The line can travel and take on different meanings in different contexts. In a Confucian context, for example, it might sound less like a call to reinvent the self than to cultivate it. This connects deeply to my own practice of working with existing images and discourses as a kind of found object or readymade. Their original contexts matter, but I am also interested in allowing them to travel beyond those contexts. To sound that line again in Gwangju is already to transform it.
In Gwangju, the phrase takes on another layer. Gwangju identifies today as a city of democracy and a city of change, and I wanted to stretch Rilke’s address to the individual towards the possibility of collective transformation. The fact that the Gwangju Biennale cannot really be conceived apart from May 18 was one of the reasons I took on this role.
For me, May 18 is also significant because it stands at the beginning of a decade in which self-organized, non-hieratchical uprisings from below transformed many parts of Asia. Gwangju in 1980 was followed by the anti-Marcos movement and People Power in the Philippines, the 8888 Uprising in Myanmar, Tiananmen and nationwide protests in China, the Wild Lily Movement in Taiwan, and others. This is something Wang Tuo’s new commission Ratchet Drill makes tangible. In the work, one uprising seems to summon another, opening Gwangju outward towards these other unfinished struggles and asking how fragments of lost or forgotten histories might become the basis for new solidarities and transformations.
So the question was never whether May 18 should be present in the biennale, but how to approach it. Its return is necessary, yet there is also a danger that it hardens into a general image of “resistance,” repeated until its particularity begins to disappear. Trauma has another kind of repetition: something happened in the past but never fully passes; it keeps returning to the present. May Mothers House embodies another way of living with that repetition. Since 2022, the mothers have returned to memories of May through painting, alongside memories of family, everyday life and things they had perhaps forgotten about themselves. In that repeated practice, memories of the past does not disappear or resolve itself, but becomes something that can be transformed and shared.
Our challenge was to remain with May 18 in this way, without simply reproducing its familiar images and meanings — to allow that history to open onto other relations while staying close to the specificity of what happened in Gwangju.
P And this edition brings a much more concentrated group of artists, smaller in number and very focused. I’m curious what felt important to you about finding this balance between breadth and depth.
HTN It turned out to be more challenging than I expected, but in a productive way. Restricting the number of artists gives you a more limited palette when composing the exhibition. At the same time, even when you focus deeply on a single artist, you often discover enormous breadth within a practice.
Perhaps this also comes from where I am personally. As a practising artist who has just turned 50, I find myself thinking more and more about the bandwidth of the work I make, and how that might connect to the breadth of life itself.
One tendency within modern and contemporary art has been towards increasing specialisation. That specificity can be enormously productive, but even something that appears very small is connected to much larger systems, because life itself unfolds across many scales. Artists have the freedom to operate at whichever scale they choose. Nina Canell, for example, can work at something close to the molecular level. Matthew Barney and Tehching Hsieh work through the body and what it is capable of enduring or becoming. Christian Nyampeta works at the scale of social organisation and collective learning, while other artists open onto planetary or cosmic scales.
What interests us above all is how these levels connect, and how an artist might move between them. Heo Baek-ryeon is particularly important to me because his practice moves from painting and tea to self-cultivation, agriculture, education and the organisation of social life. These were not separate activities for him.
In a way, that is what we are trying to do with the exhibition: connect these different scales rather than isolate them. For me, there is something political in this. If there are forces that diminish life, the question is how not to concede any sphere of it — from the molecular and intimate to the social and cosmic. Not an inch.
P And the exhibition moves across five galleries, each with its own idea of transformation.How did you think about the relationship between them?
HTN Scale was one starting point. The first gallery is called Molecules and Me. We wanted to begin with the smallest units. “Molecules” suggests physical scale, but “me,” the individual, can also be understood as a kind of molecular unit within society. So the molecule becomes a model for thinking across scales.
The gallery is almost a flooded landscape of molecular activity, centred on Goldin+Senneby’s Resin Pond, where nearly two tons of luminescent pine resin spill across the floor as a glassy amber pool that both draws the eye and blocks your path. Within the tree, resin is a protective toxin and a sealant that covers injuries and allows repair — but it is also energy-dense enough to be harvested for biofuel. The work sits precisely where healing power meets extraction, and is inseparable from the fact that one of the artists lives with multiple sclerosis, a condition in which the body’s own defenses attack what they are meant to protect. We imagined each gallery as a particular kind of landscape, with its own laws of organisation, atmosphere and rhythm.
When you enter Bodies and Bonds, the scale shifts toward the body and what binds one body to another — through family, intimacy, discipline, inheritance and repetition. Amanda Heng’s work with her mother is one example: a relationship revisited through photography over nearly three decades, so that repetition makes both time and the changing bond between mother and daughter visible.
Landscapes and Learning expands from the family into the social world. Landscape here is not simply scenery, but something cultivated, inhabited and learned through. The literati painter Heo Baek-ryeon, whom we discussed earlier, is perhaps the clearest example: painting, tea cultivation, agriculture, education and self-cultivation all belonged to one continuous practice for him.
Cosmos and Change zooms out to the widest possible scale. Saodat Ismailova’s Melted into the Sun, for example, begins with Al-Muqanna, the eighth-century figure remembered variously as prophet, revolutionary and rebel leader, and lets that historical memory move outward through bodies, landscapes and generations toward cosmic forces of destruction and renewal.
And with Air and Articulations, we return from the cosmic to something passing directly through the body. Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s Not Exactly BPM (Variation Rrose) is a deconstructed club environment of transparent vinyl inflatables, air blowers, feedback and a techno soundtrack by her collaborator Rrose. But it offers none of the release of an actual club. Instead there is a strange, suspended alertness, in which your own breathing body becomes an instrument that both plays and is played.
The actual epilogue belongs to E Roon Kang. His AI-generated poems return in a room of posters — at least one for every artist in the exhibition — accompanied by AI voices reciting them. It becomes a miniature model of the biennale, and it may well have been one of the first spaces you passed through on your way in.
So the movement is not simply from small to large. The scales fold back into one another: molecules into bodies, bodies into bonds, bonds into landscapes and social formations, landscapes into the cosmos, and then back through air, sound and language to where we began.
P What do you think will stay with you after this biennale, and what do you hope to see differently?
HTN What will stay with me most are the memories of encountering and working with all these extraordinary artists — Sohrab Hura, Saodat Ismailova, Park Chan-kyong and Kwon Byungjun, among many others. Above all, I will remember working with the curators Brian Kuan Wood, Che Kyongfa and Gahee Park, and assistant curators Yein Lee and Koyuri Sato, who braved so many long days and nights of Zoom meetings with me. I will miss them.
More generally, I feel we are in a long moment of biennale fatigue. There are real questions about their relevance even as new biennales continue to appear. The number keeps growing, but so does the fatigue, further complicated by a fraught political moment in which many biennales have become sites of conflict.
But a crisis can also become an opportunity to rethink. That feels appropriate to You Must Change Your Life. The biennale itself may be at a moment when it has to change. In the 1990s and early 2000s, biennales were often driven by a restless logic of expansion: more artists, more sites, more programmes. There were utopian dimensions to that moment of globalisation and multiculturalism, but it was also enabled by an expansionary, petroleum-driven economy. After COVID, and amid ecological crisis, that model has become increasingly uncomfortable. That is partly why this edition is deliberately concentrated: fewer artists, a single building, and more time with practices rather than racing from work to work.
I still believe strongly in biennales as platforms for experimentation. Any structure that supports artists and enables new production is worth defending, but the very idea of what a biennale or an exhibition can be should also remain open to experimentation. I hope this edition can make a small, modest contribution to that question.
The 16th Gwangju Biennale: You Must Change Your Life, Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall and selected venues throughout Gwangju, September 5–November 1, 2026.
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