Gwangju Biennale curator reveals why this year's title is 'Soft and weak like water'

Sook Kyung Lee, the event's first Korean artistic director in 15 years, was inspired by a line from a sixth-century-BC Daoist text

Sook Kyung Lee is also senior curator of international art at Tate Modern. Photo: Roger Sinek

The South Korean city of Gwangju, tucked in the country’s south-west, has come alive. The Gwangju Biennale has returned for the 14th time and is in full swing.

Running until July 9, this year’s event, titled “Soft and weak like water” features works by 79 artists from around the world. And, for the first time in 15 years, the biennale has a Korean artistic director at the helm — Sook Kyung Lee, senior curator of international art at Tate Modern.

Lee tells The National the phrase “Soft and weak like water” was borrowed from the Daoist text, Dao De Jing, believed to have been written by Laozi in sixth-century-BC China.

She explains: “It is about the paradoxical power of seemingly weak things, referring to the transformative nature of water that could break hard things like rocks or change the course of a river over a long period of time.”

The biennale reflects on water’s ability to embrace contradictions and paradoxes — imagining the substance as a metaphor, a force and a method. Taking this a step further, Lee invited artists to imagine the planet as a space of resistance, solidarity and care.

It is a poignant metaphor for an event that simultaneously pays subtle tribute to the Gwangju Uprising and Massacre of May 1980, when between 200 and 2,000 civilians lost their lives protesting against Army Major General Chun Doo-hwan’s military junta. The event was seen as a turning point in South Korea’s rocky road to democracy.

However, the biennial aims to evoke not the uprising itself, but its spirit, in solidarity with other freedom movements around the world. Its participants include Johannesburg-based artist Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi, whose paintings reflect her experience as a black woman under the South African apartheid, and Peruvian Santiago Yahuarcani, whose work aims to preserve the indigenous Huitoto culture of northern Peru from the forces of modernisation and globalisation.

Elsewhere, Malgorzata Mirga-Tas of the Bergitka Roma tribe, presents new textile works — produced using garments donated by family and friends, symbolising the Roma community’s struggle for inclusion — while Oum Jeongsoon has created a series of sculptures together with visually impaired students, representing their attempts to represent an elephant through auditory, olfactory and tactile senses.

Lee’s curatorial team also includes associate curator Kerryn Greenberg and assistant curators Sooyoung Leam and Harry C H Choi. Together, they have developed a programme that unfolds across five locations throughout Gwangju — featuring works that respond to each site's unique architectural, historical and cultural context.

Among the fascinating locations selected is Yangnim Mountain, which stands in testament to the historic Japanese colonisation, anti-colonial resistance and Christian evangelisation of the Korean Peninsula. At the foot of the mountain is the community art space, Horanggasy Art Polygon, which plays a key part in the event.

Lee says: “Yangnim Mountain's natural beauty and contested histories are perfect contexts for one of the four sub-themes of the Biennale, 'Planetary Times'. Vivian Suter's unstretched canvasses soak up daylight beautifully in a glass pavilion of the Horanggasy Art Polygon, being juxtaposed with the pioneering environmental artists from Korea, Jeoung Jae Choul and Kim Youngjae.

“In the other glass pavilion, Yuko Mohri's sound installation reflects upon an unwritten history, while Anne Duk Hee Jordan's robots and artificial creatures create underwater-like futuristic landscapes. The working Buddhist temple Mugaksa is also a great home for meditative works by Liu Jianhua, Dayanita Singh and Huong Dodinh, as well as for quietly resilient works by Hong Lee Hyun Sook and Taloi Havini.”

Mugaksa hosts a series of meditative works, reflecting on the cyclical nature of life. While Singh’s film Mona and Myself (2013) charts one of the artist’s lifelong friendships, Liu’s Realm of Reflection (2022) reinterprets the Chinese ceramic tradition in a way that provokes a Zen Buddhist reassessment of the self and the world. Elsewhere, Dodinh, who fled Vietnam during the Vietnam War and settled in France, presents abstract paintings that explore the inner creative journey.

Initially conceived during the international chaos surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, the biennale explores the roles that artistic inquiry and community-building can play in re-imagining existing systems. Taking the focus away from relentless modes of production, the curatorial team has asked participants to treat the event as an opportunity to reinvent their own practices by building on ongoing research and projects.

Lee explains: “Having spent the gruelling lockdown in London, I became interested in delving deep into the meaning of everyday, and was keen to explore the fundamentals of humanity and the future of the planet as the home of human beings and all other-than-human beings.

It may sound rather grand now, but I feel that we experienced an extremely unusual time where we could think and act differently and more radically.”

The programme draws on an intentionally diverse range of participants, including established and emerging talent, women, minorities and indigenous artists — each taking the original Daoist premise in varied directions. It includes 40 new works and commissions, responding to Lee’s interpretation of “Soft and weak like water” in various, but equally “inspiring” ways.

Lee explains: “[The artists] truly understood and valued my interpretation of this old saying. Regardless of their cultural backgrounds, many of these artists shared a sense of care and solidarity, and seemed to believe in an enduring strength of art.”

Reflecting on some of the most notable commissions, she points to Candice Lin's new work presented at the Gwangju National Museum, produced after multiple research trips in collaboration with a local master of onggi, a type of Korean pottery.

“Building on her previous enquiries into contemporary globalism of lithium battery production, Lin also embedded a rich history of mass ceramic production in Korea in this work, co-commissioned with Canal Projects.”

Another new work, co-commissioned with Han Nefkens Foundation, is Meiro Koizumi's five-channel video installation Theater of Life, which addresses the complex history of the Korean diaspora through the Koryo-in community — ethnic Koreans from post-Soviet states.

“Koizumi researched the history of Koryo Theatre in Central Asia and re-enacted some of their plays with teenage Koryo-in students living in Gwangju, revealing the legacies of a recent colonial history,” says Lee.

As someone who was born and educated in Seoul, Lee says elements of East Asian philosophy such as Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism have been “natural intellectual and cultural influences” on her thinking.

“I wanted to revisit some of these ideas as a way of thinking about the role of art in our time, when such crises as global pandemic, climate emergency and resurgent nationalism threaten our coexistence. Art seems somewhat powerless in these circumstances, but I find its power in its gentleness and persistence, like water.”