Gwangju Biennale: Round Table Round up

Photos and video by David Cowger

Every year for about nine weeks in the autumn Gwangju lives up to its name as the “City of art and culture” when the biennale rolls into town. Last year was the Design Biennale but this year it is the turn of its much bigger artier brother, the Gwangju Biennale, entitled Round Table. The exhibition takes in all five galleries at the Gwangju Biennale Hall, (whereas last year it was half the size), and is divided into six sub-themes.

The title, Round Table, refers to the relationship between the six female Co-Artistic Directors each one bringing to the table their own distinct vision and cultural perspective coming from India, Iraq, Japan, Korea, China and Indonesia, as well as spending many years curating and working in the US and Europe. The title also alludes to the Korean tradition of everyone coming together to share a meal. With this in mind, the aim of the Biennale is to create an environment for collaboration, not only between artists but between artist and viewer, thereby creating a multitude of voices. The six sub-themes further reinforce this aim with their non-linear structure, sometimes overlapping with each other.

There is certainly a theme of civil resistance that arises from the many voices created by the collaborations, with work dealing with the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, something that ties in nicely with Gwangju’s own history of civil protest. The first work you are presented with as you enter the first gallery is that of Michael Joo’s Indvisible, a collection of oil-clay reproductions of personal items from his past that appear to hover just above ground level, but are actually suspended from a sloping roof comprised of plastic police riot shields.

The Biennale literature can further fill you in on how the exhibition “is not pre-determined by any group identity or shared quality, and instead reflects a shifting, organic relationship of ideas,” but I will leave you to decipher the art lingo. When it comes down to it is it worth visiting?

Personally, I would have to say yes. The Co-Artistic Directors did a good job of pulling artists from their respective countries and beyond to provide an eclectic mix of artistic backgrounds that explore the idea of community and collaboration in its various forms. However, the show is very heavy with new media work with several video and projection installations to view within each of the galleries. For me it would have been nice to balance this with a wider selection of ‘traditional’ mediums. There are only a handful of paintings on display. The video work also breaks the flow of the exhibition with a considerable amount of time needing to be spent with each piece.

That is not to say there aren’t any videos worth seeing. I particularly liked the video projection by New York based South Korean artist Kimsooja, entitled An Album: Hudson Guild, 2009. The video was inspired by her now deceased father who had brain damage and memory loss. In the video Kimsooja mounts portraits of hitherto anonymous people from the Hudson Guild Senior Center in New York, each with their back turned to the viewer. In what is a simple but moving act the artist calls out their name and they turn to look at the camera, and for the brief moment when you look into their absent gaze you are reminded of Kimsooja’s own struggle to call out to her father in an attempt to awaken his memories, and for me I was reminded of my own family members who I’ve seen disappear behind the veil of dementia and old age.

During the opening weekend there was also a host of performance art on show outside of the Biennale that was definitely a break from the norm of what you expect to see in Korea. The most memorable was a performance by Japanese artist Arai Shinichi where he stripped down in front of all and sundry with only a makeshift fig leaf of the children’s action figure Astro Boy covering his modesty. He then proceeded to squat down in front of his audience and simulate defecating with a tube of black paint  before rubbing his backside in it and smearing it over a canvas. Shinichi then went on to read pages from a book ripping each page out, stuffing it into his mouth and shouting “Atoms for Peace.” This continued until he could not push anymore paper into his mouth, but lasted longer than I would have thought possible as he was gagging continuously. The performance was a political statement against the use of nuclear power in Japan but I am not sure how many people took this message away with them. Watching the audience interact with the performance was almost as interesting as the performance itself, people drawn to the artist from a distance not knowing what was happening before seeing Astro Boy and looking very confused, while families shielded the eyes of their children.

The Gwangju Biennale ends on the 11 November. You will definitely need the majority of the day to fully appreciate the scale of the Biennale and it is probably worth making a return visit too. There is a lot to satisfy your artistic appetite and it is certainly a long wait before anything as good rolls back into Gwangju.