GWANGJU, South Korea, June 9,
2026 — The 16th Gwangju Biennale unveiled 43 artists and groups from different parts of the
world. Selected by Artistic Director Ho Tzu Nyen and curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee, and Brian Kuan Wood, this cohort brings together diverse
generational and geographical voices to explore how new capacities and forms of
life emerge through sustained artistic practice. The title of the 16th edition
You Must Change Your Life is the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1908
poem Archaic Torso of Apollo: “You must change your life”—a call at once
urgent yet open, forceful yet generous. The Biennale approaches change as a
continuous practice through which bodies and perceptions are reorganized.
Though change is often most apparent in moments of sudden rupture and crisis,
it is also through the gradual accumulation of day-to-day life practices that
we expand our capacity to affect—and to be affected. “We envision this Biennale to
be a gathering of struggles and experimentations across different scales and
spheres to converse with each other, to question each other and above all, to
amplify each other,” said Ho Tzu Nyen. The Biennale unfolds as a
journey across scales—from the molecular to the cosmic, from intimate gestures
and familiar bonds to social formations and resonances across worlds.
Throughout the exhibition, artists approach change through multiple registers: from
the molecular poetics of Nina Canell to the existential weight of
late-socialist life choices in the paintings of Wang Jiahao; from Rafik
Greiss’s invocation of Sufi transcendence through breath, movement, and
repetition, to practices that seek new ways of inhabiting body, history, and
relations with others. Techniques of transformation
and self-transformation can be found in the practices of mystics, athletes, and
artists. In the 16th edition of the Biennale, artists such as Tehching Hsieh
and Amanda Heng show how sustained practice—through repetition, discipline, and
attention—can render one’s own life as material, reshaping perception and
creating new ways of inhabiting time. Others such as A K Dolven,
Matthew Barney, Jeong Geumhyung, and Angela Goh approach the body as
continuously produced through affirmation and restraint, defamiliarization and
reconfiguration. Mona Benyamin’s works, meanwhile, defamiliarize the family unit
itself, estranging and reimagining intimacies in a world of political
injustice, instability and absurdity. Elsewhere, viewers may follow
the path of Rim Dong Sik as he develops new ways of being with landscape,
eventually encountering Nature Artist Woo Pyongnam (Jongsun). Nearby will be
servings of tea cultivated through the practices of traditional ink painter Heo
Baekryeon, who founded the Gwangju Agricultural Technical High School in 1947,
bringing together art and agriculture, landscape and learning. For artists like Christian
Nyampeta, the body is activated in relation to other bodies, each amplifying
the capacities of others across distant collective learning projects and
affinities. In the works of Kiri Dalena, bodies cross thresholds from a molecular
individual, to a family member, to a collective body protesting in the street.
In the visions of Saodat Ismailova and Sohrab Hura, bodies begin to resonate
with other worlds altogether. Moving audiences across
different scales and intensities, the exhibition approaches artistic practice
itself as producing capacities to sense, to endure, to relate, to imagine, and
to transform. Artistic practice emerges here as a force of exercise and repetition
that tests and constantly reinvents such capacities. The Biennale approaches
Gwangju as a site of exhibition, but also as a city where art, collective
action, and political change are inseparable, where the courageous and creative
transformation of duress is a historical reality. The Biennale will include a
presentation of paintings by the members of the May Mothers House, whose
collective persistence and creativity the 16th Gwangju Biennale is honored to
share with you. The 16th Gwangju Biennale is
curated by Artistic Director Ho Tzu Nyen together with curators Che Kyongfa,
Park Gahee, and Brian Kuan Wood, alongside assistant curators Lee Yein and
Koyuri Sato. Participating Artists Matthew
Barney, Jean Barth, James Benning, Mona Benyamin, Rossella Biscotti, CAMP, Nina
Canell, Lygia Clark, Kiri Dalena & Ben Brix, A K Dolven, İnci Eviner,
Angela Goh, Goldin+Senneby, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Rafik Greiss, Amanda Heng,
Heo Baekryeon (Gwangju Agricultural Technical High School), James T. Hong,
Tehching Hsieh, Sohrab Hura, Saodat Ismailova, Volcanoes of Jeju (Jeju Stone
Park), Jeong Geumhyung, E Roon Kang, Sunik Kim, Július Koller, Daisuke Kosugi,
Kwon Byungjun and Park Chan-kyong, Lu Yang, May Mothers House, Melvin Moti, Nam
Hwayeon, Christian Nyampeta, Bhenji Ra, Rim Dong Sik and Nature Artist Woo
Pyongnam (Jongsun), Ryu Hankil, Sasaki Ken, Suzuki Akio, Ullimsanbang (Huh
Ryeon, Huh Hyeong, Huh Geon, Huh Lim, Huh Moon, Hur Jin), Wang Jiahao, Wang
Tuo, Maya Watanabe |
