Gwangju

Gwangju Biennale opens September 5

05.09.2014

The president of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation—Lee Yong-woo' s resignation becomes effective after the opening of the 10th Gwangju Biennale' s main exhibition "Burning Down the House".

The Gwangju Biennale—Asia's first and most prestigious contemporary art biennale, which was founded in memory of spirits of civil uprising of the 1980 repression of the Gwangju Democratization Movement, in September 1995.

The theme of this year—10th edition is "Burning Down the House" which explores the process of burning and transformation, a cycle of obliteration and renewal witnessed throughout history. Evident in aesthetics, historical events, and an increasingly rapid course of redundancy and renewal in commercial culture, the Biennale reflects on this process of, often violent, events of destruction or self-destruction―burning the home one occupies―followed by the promise of the new and the hope for change.

The biennale enmeshed in a controversy of censorship surrounding a satirical painting rejected for  the Gwangju Biennale's 20th anniversary exhibition, "Sweet Dew – After 1980": The painting depicts family members of the children who died in the nation's April ferry disaster confronting South Korean president Park Geun-hye is being held back by her late father—former president Park Chung-hee, and her chief of staff Kim Ki-choon. In response to the censorship,  a group of Japanese artists from Okinawa have removed their works from the exhibition and its curator, Yun Beom-mo, has resigned.

"It is vital that art move past efforts to normalize and standardize. This has to start with freeing itself from a self-censoring attitude that excludes ethical and moral self-examination. The Gwangju Biennale has upheld these principles for the last 20 years. In Gwangju, the phrase "Gwangju spirit" has taken hold—less because of the institutionalization of democracy than because of a promise regarding the hundreds of people sacrificed in resistance to an oppressive power in 1980."  Lee Yong-woo said in an interview published on Art in America on August 28, 2014.        

Lee Yong-woo. Photo courtesy Gwangju Biennale Foundation.

Sewol Owol, (detail). Photo courtesy artist Hong Song-dam.