'10,000 Lives' and the power of simplicity

The recently closed eighth Gwangju Biennale (Sept. 3 to Nov. 7) in Gwangju, South Korea shows what a curator can do in the breadth and expanse of the mega-exhibition of contemporary times. Titled “10,000 Lives,” the exhibition presented an overview of the power of images of works from the start of the 20th century to the present.

While as academics and researchers, curators may be forced to narrow their focus of study, the scale of the biennale allows a curator to explore a particular idea extensively, backed by space, funding and a lineup of assistance. The fascination and brilliance of this biennale lies in the simplicity of its idea, its demonstration of the idea through its vastness, and by its execution and order. While little to none could be argued on its theme, a show with such scope as presenting visual culture and not strictly limited to works of contemporary art could have easily slipped into a chaotic and disordered array of nearly anything. While going through more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space filled with works of 134 artists is certainly a dizzying affair, the palpable exercise of control showed the command of its artistic director Massimiliano Gioni and his curatorial team.

Though with a few other venues, the four partitioned galleries of the Gwangju Biennale Hall could be said to form the core of the exhibition. It was orchestrated as a narrative space, meaning visitors are obliged to follow the set path that leads them through the maze of the exhibition. One could not go to Gallery 4 without passing through the bending corridors and spaces of Galleries 1, 2 and 3, and the only exit was either to go forward or to go back. While imposing, this ensures that viewers go through a whirlwind of objects, artworks and videos which mimic the manmade visual deluges of the current period. The point of the exhibition is driven through the delivery of the overwhelming experience that echo our media-saturated landscape.

Byungsoo Choi, “Portrait of Hanyeol Lee,” 1987, drawings, paintings, and truck, dimensions variable

Each gallery concentrates on a particular theme. Gallery 1 focused on photographic representation, which the biennale with its theme was naturally predisposed to throughout. Sanggil Kim’s (b. 1974, Gyeongsan) “Offline Communities” series brought various online communities of different interests together in person, many for the first time, to be photographed for group portraits. Kim’s attempt to gather and translate such esoteric Internet groups, like those interested in Alaska Malamutes, the Sound of Music or Burberry plaid, into its visual representation demonstrates the challenges of image and the influence of the imagined in the increasing preference or possibilities of online communicative exchange. A particularly powerful work by Arnoud Holleman (b. 1964, Holland) shows film footage of Staphorst in the Netherlands in the 1960s. The residents in this fundamentalist Protestant village demonstrate a bizarre aversion to the camera, holding up their hands and turning away their faces the image-making device a seeming devil to suck them into the underworld. The black and white footage, shown at decelerated speed, seems odd, especially during these camera-happy times, as well as chilling, even if only slightly as if there was perhaps some truth to the basis of their fear. It forms a worthy juxtaposition to the works of self-portraiture exhibited in one of the biennale’s other venues, the Gwangju Museum of Art.

Gallery 2 dealt with the mechanics of vision through optical illusions and para-scientific imaginaries. There were artworks which explored geometric patterns, flashing color projections and landmark photography techniques. Part of this gallery was Carsten Höller’s (b. 1961, Brussels) “Infrared Room” (2006), which recorded the presence of gallery visitors via infrared camera and projected this onto triple screens through a very slight time delay. It was perhaps a little too slight to be noticed in this context as one passes from room to room in this mega-exhibition. In its mediation between self and image, it quite reminded me of a more subtle version of Filipino media artist Tad Ermitaño’s “Shift Register” (2001, .mov festival Greenbelt/2006, Ogaki Biennale) wherein a photographic image is taken of unsuspecting persons that trigger the camera as they walk through a space and the persons are suddenly confronted by their faces projected onto a wall before the image subsequently melts. 

Byungsoo Choi, “Portrait of Hanyeol Lee,” 1987, drawings, paintings, and truck, dimensions variable (Gwangju Biennale exhibition installation)

Gallery 3 dealt with the representation of heroes and martyrs, a part of the exhibition that ties in well with South Korea’s history of democracy that has strong roots in Gwangju, the commemoration of which formed part of the reasons of the biennale’s own founding in 1995. Indeed, it had a portrait made by Byungsoo Choi (b. 1960, Seoul) of student activist Lee Han-yeol Lee this portrait of which millions marched behind in protest from his death from injury while attending a pro-democracy rally. The power of its symbolism was underscored by the portrait being destroyed by police at that time, only to be reconstructed by Choi after its second version was also attacked. As it surely does with other countries as well, it resonates with the Philippines’ own history of democracy and the role that images played in its affair and own memorialization after, fashioned as much by ordinary people as well as by artists.

Gallery 4 brought together religious figures, idols, fetishes and dolls, which was also included in a smaller and eerily unsettling exhibition within this gallery that played unofficial homage to Mike Kelley’s “The Uncanny” survey show in 1993 after Sigmund Freud’s definition of the same name. The gallery also included a work of Tino Sehgal (b. 1976, London), my own first experience of a work by this artist who employs hired actors to perform and legendarily disallows video and photographic documentation of his work. Watching a girl slowly writhe on the floor and also encountering another work of Sehgal in the Media City Seoul exhibition a few days later, I realized how Sehgal’s tactic of visual control cultivates a savvy and mythic build-up of the imagined to propagate his and his art’s status, extending much more beyond the actual encounters.

One of the show’s strengths lies in its selection of items that were not made in the context of contemporary art. There were funerary sculptures, drawings designed to be healing rituals, photographs of a Chinese man who posed for his own portraits yearly from 1907 till his death in 1968. Such inclusions allow for “10,000 Lives” named after the series of poetic portraits by Korean author Ko Un of over 4,000 people he met of real, historical and fictional figures, that began during his imprisonment for participating in the 1980 South Korean Democracy Movement to be almost if not certainly all-embracing, as well as demonstratively relevant. The spectacle of the usual site-specific commissioned biennale work may have been absent but the deft utilization of the massive exhibition space thoughtfully (vs. perfunctorily) filled with hundreds of works allowed a basic idea to abundantly explore its nuances and provide its robust expression. 

In relation to the local art scene and the percolating but still not that well known news, such an exhibition as the Gwangju Biennale, in the extent of its foundation and city ambitions, should form an interesting point of comparison to the upcoming Visayas Biennale, taking place this week in Cebu City.

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The Gwangju Biennale took place from Sept. 3 to Nov. 7. More information at http://gb.or.kr/?mid=main_eng. For more information on this week’s Visayas Biennale from Nov. 16-19 with some of its exhibitions up till Dec. 30, visit http://biennale.pusodcebu.com/. The author may be contacted at letterstolisa@gmail.com; her art writings are at http://writelisawrite.blogspot.com.