Ho Tzu Nyen, artist director of the 16th Gwangju Biennale. Courtesy of Gwangju Biennale, Photo by Lee il chun

The Gwangju Biennale is not only one of the oldest and most important biennales in Asia, but also an example of a context-specific art event deeply rooted in the history of its place of origin. Behind the biennial’s 16th edition, opening September 5, is Ho Tzu Nyen, a world-renowned Singaporean artist and a regular presence himself on the biennale circuit, who, together with curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee and Brian Kuan Wood, selected 43 artists and groups from around the world to participate.

When Ho Tzu Nyen was invited to submit a proposal for the 16th Gwangju Biennale, he immediately agreed, drawn by the city’s singular political history and the significance of the May 18 Democratic Uprising. “Looking at recent history and what we are going through around the world, where we see democratic systems being continuously subverted, all of these situations pushed me toward saying yes,” he told Observer during Art Basel Hong Kong.

For Ho, what happened in Gwangju in 1980 cannot be understood solely as a Korean event; it was also deeply significant for Asia. “What was unique about the Gwangju Uprising was that it was a horizontal uprising that an elite group did not lead,” he explained. During the 1980s, similar movements emerged across Asia. In Taiwan and Myanmar there were comparable uprisings from below, as well as the major uprising in the Philippines, now officially referred to as the People Power movement, which overthrew Marcos. At the tail end of the 1980s came Tiananmen. “One could say that this decade of horizontal uprisings in Asia began with Gwangju and ended with Tiananmen,” he added.

He first immersed himself in this history in 2020, when he participated in that year’s Gwangju Biennale and was commissioned to make a work marking the uprising’s 40th anniversary. That experience became an important foundation for his approach to the forthcoming edition, titled “You Must Change Your Life.” Drawn from the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1908 poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, the title becomes a resonant call today, given the current state of the world. The biennale envisioned by Tzu Nyen aims to become a platform for social practice and collective healing, approaching change as an ongoing process through which bodies and perceptions are reorganized. Anchoring the entire curatorial approach is the conviction that the gradual accumulation of day-to-day practices expands our capacity to affect and be affected.

While Tzu Nyen respects the biennale’s continuing commitment to remembering 1980, he was wary of simply repeating the city’s trauma. Drawing on the Freudian notion that the unconscious does not experience time, he argues that revisiting a traumatic history can also perpetually reactivate it. “A trauma that you suffered in the past is constantly present,” he reflected. “Revisiting Gwangju is important, but at the same time, it also repeats the trauma unless one can find a way to change—to take these histories, break the cycle or convert this energy into something positive.”

This notion of continuous change and transformation as an ongoing practice is a key part of how he is imagining this next edition. In selecting artists, the curatorial team has favored those who have transformed political persecution, generational trauma, illness, family obligations or other difficulties into sustained artistic practices. “We are interested in artists who try, in their own ways, to convert the obstacles, difficulties, negative energies or generational traumas they face into something else: into a practice, a way to continue living and a way to change themselves,” Tzu Nyen said, emphasizing that changing does not mean forgetting. “It means changing with history.”

In his own artistic practice, Tzu Nyen also consistently engages with history, applying to the curation of the Gwangju Biennale the same synchronic approach he brings to his art, staging a fluid dialogue among the past, present and future. In his exhibitions, Tzu Nyen typically works by assembling and rearranging existing material: archival footage, historical documents, philosophical texts, paintings, popular music, cinema, folklore and political narratives. Fact and fiction are deliberately interwoven, allowing historical figures and events to appear as shifting images as different videos overlap in the space, translating a fluid sense of truth that emerges through the blurring and continuous dialectical exchange between perspectives and historical moments. “This idea of layering, creating layers and creating unexpected meeting points is definitely one of our key strategies,” he confirmed.

Installation view: “Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Cloud” at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, South Korea, 2024. Photo: Seowon Nam. Courtesy of Art Sonje Center ⓒ 2024. Art Sonje Center all rights reserved.

Most of the artists on the list are contemporary, with only a few properly historical figures. The selection includes internationally celebrated names already in the history books, such as Matthew Barney and Lygia Clark; established artists including Jean Bartholomé, James Benning, Rossella Biscotti and Nina Canell; as well as many Korean artists, artists from across the region and local groups such as Gwangju Agricultural Technical High School, Volcanoes of Jeju (Jeju Stone Park) and Ullimsanbang (Huh Ryeon, Huh Hyeong, Huh Geon, Huh Lim, Huh Moon and Hur Jin), among many others.

All of those selected have sustained their practices for a substantial period of time—one of Tzu Nyen’s main criteria. “I am interested in artists who have already had years of practice and whose work allows us to sense or see how they have dealt with the many difficulties they have encountered in their lives,” he said. “We are interested in this quality of creatively persisting.”

Naturally, this emphasis includes work with therapeutic or ritualistic dimensions. However, Ho is less interested in practices that explicitly advertise themselves as therapy than in work that produces therapeutic effects through sustained artistic engagement. He is also wary of treating self-care in isolation. Personal, familial and political struggles operate at different scales, he argued, but always remain connected to the broader questions humanity faces today. “It is important to think about these therapeutic practices in relation to the larger questions and catastrophes that are everywhere.”

As an artist with limited formal curatorial experience, Ho knew he needed experienced curators around him. He invited Che Kyongfa, with whom he had previously collaborated on a solo exhibition, for her professionalism, independent sensibility and deep ethic of care. Park Gahee’s presence as a Korean curator was equally essential to understanding the specific cultural and historical context in which the biennale operates. Brian Kuan Wood completes the four-person curatorial team.

The biennale is international, with artists from several continents, but it has a deliberately strong Asian presence. Ho wanted to avoid creating a broad global survey and instead focused on individual practices, letting the selection emerge from the work itself. The Asian emphasis also reflects the curatorial team’s own locations and networks, Ho acknowledges.

Although the biennale will inevitably address an international professional audience and international themes, Ho emphasizes that the citizens of Gwangju are its primary audience. For this reason, he is conceiving the exhibition as a layered structure through which different audiences can construct their own narratives. Ho’s hope is that, by engaging with the citizens of Gwangju, the biennale can open up the discourse, thought and memory surrounding what May 18 means in relation to current struggles. “One of our key ways of addressing that audience is, of course, to rethink the weight of the past since 1980. But we are also interested in connecting that history to the other types of struggles that everyone goes through in their lives, with family, loved ones or even their own health.”

Saodat Ismailova, Melted into the Sun, 2024. Single-channel video, color, 5.1 sound, 35 minutes 50 seconds; video still. Courtesy of the artist

One of the clearest examples is the participation of the May Mothers’ House, an association of women who lost husbands and children during the uprising or who continue to care for relatives permanently traumatized by it. During a research visit, Ho encountered hundreds of small paintings made by the women during regular art therapy sessions. The association’s secretary-general was able to recount the individual story behind each work, revealing an entire personal history behind every image.

The May Mothers will participate in the biennale as artists rather than simply as subjects of a public program. Ho’s team is exploring how to record and present the stories behind approximately 500 paintings and how to involve the women in curating their own section. The project exemplifies his attempt to connect private experience, collective memory, therapeutic practice and exhibition-making without placing them in separate institutional categories.

This edition will be the smallest in the biennale’s history. As an artist well aware of the dynamics at play in a biennale, Ho deliberately reduced the number of participants by at least half to allow each artistic practice more physical space, attention and resources. Yet the other major experiment is that, even though this edition has the fewest artists, it will have the largest number of works on view. “Some artists will show several works from across the trajectory of their practice,” Ho anticipated.

If a typical biennial is made up of individual works by individual artists, like a picture composed of points that viewers then have to connect, Ho wanted to try to make a biennale “out of lines,” as he described it. “These lines are made out of multiple points by each artist, and we are asking how we can draw these lines and weave them together.”

Ho’s approach also changes how the biennale will support production. Rather than routinely commissioning artists to create something specifically for the exhibition, Ho wants to invest in works and practices that artists are already developing, whether or not the biennale exists. “Sometimes, artists are commissioned to make very specific works for biennales. When it works, it is amazing. But very often, these are not the strongest works in an artist’s practice, or it is no longer the right moment for that type of work,” Ho observed, likely drawing from his own experience.

The demands of the biennale have forced him to temporarily suspend the production of his own work until the exhibition opens. But Ho does not see it as a rupture in his own artistic practice. “My work always begins with other people’s works, other people’s writings and other people’s exhibitions,” he said. “My own work is a kind of rearrangement, so it is not that different from curating. I see this as a continuation of what I am already doing.” For him, the biennale has also been a rare opportunity to leave the confines of his own thinking and immerse himself in the practices of other artists. “I am interested and curious to see how other artists live and how they work, and to consider them as models from whom I can learn. That is one of my secret intentions.”

Jeong Geumhyung, Rehab Training, 2022. Performance at Impulstanz x mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Peter Mayr.

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