GWANGJU BIENNALE

Details are slowly beginning to emerge about the eighth Gwangju Biennale, which opens in that industrial South Korean city in September. Although the list of 100 artists whose work will be on view won’t be released until April, Massimiliano Gioni, its artistic director, has announced the biennale’s title: “10,000 Lives.”



“I’m asking the question, what is the role of artists in our image-polluted society?” Mr. Gioni said. “The biennale will explore the relationships that bind people to images and images to people.”



The title is taken from “Maninbo” (“Ten Thousand Lives”), an unfinished multivolume poem by Ko Un, a dissident poet. He was accused of treason and held in solitary confinement in 1980 for his participation in the South Korean democratic movement. (He was later pardoned). While imprisoned, he started writing a poem describing every single person he had met in his life.



Mr. Gioni said that unlike most biennales, which focus primarily on contemporary art, his will include work from the early 20th century on. And not everything was meant to be art, per se. There will also be found objects, some photographs, some salvaged artifacts.

“I’m trying to look at images across time,” he said.