Intentionally Smaller and Slower, the 16th Gwangju Biennale Traces a Path of Change
“You Must Change Your Life” is the title of the 16th Gwangju Biennale, which runs through November 15 and asks us to radically reconsider the way we look at our position in the world, considering the possibilities from individual and collective life to the broader ecosystem of relations between human and nonhuman beings, and ultimately to the cosmic ensemble of interdependence and interconnection. Led by artist Ho Tzu Nyen alongside curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee and Brian Kuan Wood, as well as assistant curators Lee Yein and Koyuri Sato, the biennial brings together 43 artists—an intentionally contained number compared with other recent exhibitions, giving individual works more space to expand and visitors more time to spend with them. As their names recur on the wall texts mounted through the Gwangju Biennale’s five galleries, the artists gradually become familiar, like traveling companions on a journey toward new levels of awareness.
In contrast with the biennialization phenomenon of recent years, which has often followed a logic of expansion, Ho and his team wanted to explore the intensity of attention, he explained during the opening press conference. The format is an attempt to achieve sustainability, not just ecologically, but also a sustainability of attention. “Rather than moving rapidly from one artist to the next, we wanted to spend more time with practices that have themselves been formed over years, sometimes decades, of sustained artistic attention and repetition,” he explained. “A large exhibition typically turns artists into dots. One artist, one work, one moment of attention, and you move on. We wanted instead to follow lines. A practice is a line through time.”
The biennial takes its title from the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (1908), which came to Ho after a particularly intense period. “You must change your life” sounds urgent, even forceful, yet the Gwangju Biennale approaches change not as a destination but as a method. The idea of repetition is central to the exhibition, which moves away from the idea of change as a single dramatic event, crisis, conversion or catastrophe. Much of our lives is shaped by what we do repeatedly: choices that become habits and practices, producing fundamental transformation over time through exercise, discipline, work, reversal, cultivation, attention and repetition. “Change does not exist at one speed,” Ho explained. “We tend to think of change as rupture, and change can certainly be explosive, but it can also be so slow and continuous that we barely perceive it.”
Equally significant is the decision to include nonhuman presences among the artists’ works, further extending both the philosophical and temporal perspective. Groups of volcanic rocks from Jeju appear across the galleries and are positioned almost as participating artists themselves: metaphors for the progressive transformations unfolding in nature, and reminders that creation existed long before human authorship.
Five galleries, five dimensions of change
This curatorial vision translates into an extremely clear exhibition structure: five galleries conceived not simply as five thematic sections but as five different modes, scales, landscapes and atmospheres.
The first is “Molecules and Me,” exploring the individual yet potentially expansive and always dynamic dimension of our existence as molecules and particles. The human presence is at the center: images and sculptures of bodies, of individuals confronting the very physical but intrinsically interdependent dimension of existing and moving through the world. The human figure here reveals itself as dependent upon and acted upon by materials, landscapes, political systems, biological processes and other bodies.
At the entrance we have our first encounter with what becomes a recurring presence through the rooms: the work of Sasaki Ken, here with rippled surfaces suggesting the infinitely expansive, ever-changing nature of the desert, and a nebulous sky that could depict the infinity of the cosmos but also portrays human disaster in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. As we proceed through the rooms, his paintings move from particles to the hyperrealism of daily objects, exploring the different scales through which we can conceive our existence. “There is no single word that tells us what Sasaki Ken’s practice means. Meaning instead accumulates through recurrence. You see something, move away from it, encounter the artist again later,” Ho said.
At the center of the room, Goldin+Senneby’s Resin Pond (2026) spreads nearly two tons of luminous pine resin across the floor, forming a glassy amber pool that is visually seductive but physically obstructive, and potentially poisonous. The work draws from Jakob Senneby’s experience of living with multiple sclerosis, a chronic autoimmune condition in which the body’s defense mechanisms attack the nervous system they are meant to protect. The installation invites us to contemplate the fragile systems by which life protects and sustains itself but can also potentially turn against itself.
Around this toxic pond are Jean Barth’s life-size hybrid sculptures, inspired in part by the casts of victims preserved after the eruption of Vesuvius at Pompeii. Shaped by her transgender experience but extending beyond autobiography, the work approaches the body as something socially, politically and materially unstable. Their sculptural presence hovers between physical and virtual origins, having emerged through 3D modeling, performance capture and printed self-portraits as digital avatars, staging the unstable nature of today’s living experience between the digital and the sensorial.
A sense of loneliness and isolation emerges from Wang Jiajiao’s life-size painted bodies: a contemporary return to social realism with scenes of couples and families interacting, where the subjects are together but already crossed by distance, subtly detached from one another, suspended in the low-level alienation of contemporary life.
On large suspended screens comes our first encounter with Saodat Ismailova, an Uzbek artist we will meet repeatedly through the exhibition. In Zukhra (2013), a life-size sleeping girl appears suspended between dimensions, sleep and wakefulness, life and death. Her heartbeat fills the space, drawing us into dreams and into the blurred historical memories passing through them: forgotten ancestors, the Soviet construction of Uzbekistan as a nation-state and the Hujum campaign, which turned women’s bodies into political terrain.
Also recurring through the show is the narrative of Kiri Dalena, as she confronts the fragility of individual fates as they become interlaced with political and economic systems. In Life Masks (2013-), she photographs activists, cultural workers and families affected by state violence wearing plaster casts of their own faces, often within domestic spaces. The white masks erase identity but create another form of portraiture that allows us to contemplate their shared destinies as victims of the same systems.
There are relatively few paintings in the exhibition. Among them are Rim Dong Sik’s portrayals of humans immersed in landscape, drawing from his performances over the past five decades as he tests ways of extending the body into nature, dissolving the boundary between artist and environment.
Rossella Biscotti similarly treats matter as a living document, expanding the idea of portraiture beyond the represented body. The first works we encounter in Gallery 1 are luminescent imprinted latex sheets evoking women from colonial-era Indonesia. The work draws inspiration from Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet (Tetralogi Buru, 1980-1988), composed orally while the writer was imprisoned on Buru Island under President Suharto’s regime. Their materiality carries history, as the Dutch East Indies became a major site of colonial rubber production.
Screening in an alcove, Maya Watanabe’s Liminal takes us into the aftermath of Peru’s armed conflict, moving between geological scale and anthropogenic violence. Approximately 70,000 people were killed, but Watanabe narrows that abstraction to a fragment of human bone and, behind it, to an individual whose identity may still remain unresolved. The landscape becomes a terrible field of transformation: body into earth, earth into evidence, evidence into identity and, potentially, identity into memory.
Across Gallery 1, boundaries continually lose their stability: body and landscape, self and other, protection and attack, memory and matter. It is about what happens once we stop imagining anything as isolated. The closer we look, the more relations begin to appear.
The second section is “Bodies and Bonds.” Helping the transition is Ryu Hankil’s What the Old Tree Left Behind (2026), installed along the ramp linking different levels of the Biennale Hall. Beginning from the memory of a single site, it unfolds through an arrangement of wooden elements. Hankil uses “sonic thinking” to collapse the distance between composition and perception. For him, sound is not simply something heard but a way of thinking through vibration, rhythm, pressure and duration, in relation to the surroundings and across durations far beyond human perception.
The second gallery further extends the reflection into the interrelational dimension of our experience of the world, focusing on interpersonal relations and social systems shaping our existence. The gallery is structured almost as a playfield, centered on the notion of training and on how repeated practice shapes the body, subjectivity and relationships.
A ping-pong table at the entrance is a work by Julius Koller, an artist who lived and worked in socialist Czechoslovakia after the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, and whose practice the Gwangju Biennale is resurfacing. His works are meant to function as open investigations, keeping reality open to questions and asking how individuals come into relation with one another and with the systems that structure our lives: described as “cultural situations,” his U.F.O. (“Universal Futurological Operations”) created a deliberately open framework for imagining reality otherwise, an invitation to inquiry and critical doubt as a way to resist ideologies. The ping-pong table, with the back-and-forth exchange of the ball, becomes here a metaphor for communication and fair play accompanying our relation with the world.
Sasaki Ken reappears here with paintings of shoes, domestic objects and objects created by various women in his family. Family relations are one of the recurrent themes in the gallery, reappearing also in Amanda Hang’s photographs, where she follows her relationship with her mother across almost 30 years. Through the repeated act of photographing themselves together, subtle shifts emerge in distance, intimacy and the changing structures of care as both women age.
Mona Benyamin also works through family relations, but against a very different political landscape. Borrowing the familiar language and exaggerated rhythms of television drama, she uses humor to examine how occupation and political violence seep into everyday domestic life, and how comedy itself can become a form of refusal, a way of resisting the normalization of that violence. A similarly bittersweet intimacy runs through the photographs of Indian artist Sohrab Hura, where encounters remain close to the skin and the domestic sphere.
Questions of duration and transformation take a more collective form in the presentation by the May Mothers’ House in Gwangju, a community established in 2006 by women whose lives were profoundly shaped by the 1980 uprising. Some lost relatives to state violence; others were themselves injured and have carried that trauma for decades. Since 2022, members have taken part in painting workshops led by artist Joo Hong under themes including “Remembering,” “Finding Myself” and “Solidarity.” The 322 paintings on view move freely between historical trauma and the seemingly ordinary details of life.
Other works in this section explore the relation between time, systems and the body, often through repetitive gestures and self-imposed protocols that attempt to impose structure on the messiness of existence.
In Matthew Barney’s early video SCABACTION (1988), the body already appears as the construction site it would remain throughout his later practice. Mechanical, sexual and sculptural processes collapse into one another: metal is welded, gears turn and, in an extreme close-up, pliers extract an ingrown hair from a male jaw. The body is never stable or given once and for all, but something continually produced through exertion, obstruction, desire and pain.
Jennifer Benning’s Data Entry (2014), for instance, turns decoding into an almost obsessive manual ritual. Her hand repeatedly transfers two-digit numbers from a notebook into a computer program built to decipher Ted Kaczynski’s elaborate journal codes. The repetition becomes its own strange choreography, somewhere between archival research, mechanical labor and an attempt to force order onto another person’s internal system.
Tehching Hsieh pushes that logic of discipline to its extreme in his year-long performances, imposing rigid conditions on his own life and following them without interruption. In Time Clock Piece, he punched a time clock every hour, day and night, for an entire year. All boundaries between art and life dissolve, while time ceases to be abstract, registering itself physically through exhaustion, repetition and endurance.
Geumhyung Jeong similarly approaches the body through systems of training and rehabilitation. In Rehab Training (2015), medical equipment, mannequins and therapeutic devices hover somewhere between sculpture and instruments awaiting activation. Rehabilitation here is itself a form of choreography: a process of learning and relearning gesture, in which awareness of the body becomes most acute precisely when its movements can no longer be taken for granted.
That same reasoning informs Rossella Biscotti’s Alfabeto (2018), a series of 12 black-and-white photographs made after months of physiotherapy following an injury. Shot at a neurorehabilitation center in Rome, where patients relearn movement with a robotic exoskeleton, the work treats bodily mechanics almost as a language that must continually be practiced, corrected and reconstructed.
From here, the Gwangju Biennale expands the perspective further to “Landscapes and Learning,” where collective life and knowledge take root and grow through cultivation. The section opens with Suzuki Akio, who brings to Gwangju his seminal work o to da te, mapping the space and establishing directions to navigate and develop an expanded awareness of the self within it. Subtle interventions within and outside the exhibition hall invite us to become more attentive to our surroundings, to notice the systems beneath everyday life and to realize how rarely we perceive them until something breaks.
Next to it, Rossella Biscotti’s The Heads in Question casts the interiors of abandoned portraits of Mussolini and King Vittorio Emanuele III, commissioned for the unrealized 1942 Universal Exhibition in Rome, transforming authoritarian monumentality into colored silicone and resin forms that are pliable, hollow and unstable. Where fascist aesthetics sought to mold people into ideal subjects, Biscotti reverses the operation, leaving us with cavities still haunted by the monsters that shaped them.
Nearby, James T. Hong’s video Apologies compiles official apologies delivered by heads of state and government into a growing archive of political contrition. The work is played inside the gallery and each evening across the Biennale Hall facade, resonating profoundly with the history of a city that once fought to defend the value of democracy.
Nina Canell, meanwhile, brings infrastructure itself back as a kind of revenant. Severed sections of high-voltage and data cables, once buried underground or beneath the sea, lie inert across the floor. Their exposed interiors reveal surprisingly visceral layers of metal, fiber and insulation. No longer transmitting, they become interrupted circuits, dead ends that nevertheless retain the memory, and perhaps the potential, of connection, while making visible those invisible forces, physical and economic, that shape the flux of our existence.
A different negotiation between private life and political forces unfolds in Kiri Dalena and Ben Brix’s two-channel video Walang Maulingan. Moving through the contemporary Philippines in the aftermath of Duterte’s “war on drugs,” the work continually shifts scale: aerial views of cities, billboards, demonstrations and catastrophe give way to long, intimate observations of domestic life. Family and friendship expand outward into collective action and street protest, until the film culminates in a reenactment of the Crucifixion. The individual is never entirely separate from the larger forces acting upon it.
That sense of interdependence also appears through older traditions of cultivation. Uijae Huh Back-ryun understood painting, calligraphy, poetry, tea, agriculture and education not as distinct disciplines but as intertwined ways of shaping the self in relation to a community. After Korea’s liberation, he extended that philosophy into rural education and reconstruction, guided by the idea of love for heaven, land and people. Here, paintings, calligraphy and tea utensils are less relics than evidence of a worldview in which personal cultivation and collective flourishing remain inseparable. Visitors are invited to share a cup of Chunseol-cha while looking out across the surrounding landscape.
Next to them, the works of Nina Canell and Lygia Clark reactivate the curiosity that accompanies a genuine encounter with the world. Clark’s Bichos bring back a physical, both sensorial and emotional, engagement with our surroundings: made from metal plates joined by hinges, they can be folded and unfolded by participants, taking on different forms each time. Canell’s Necromancer could resemble a toy or a river in the rhythmic flow of organic and industrial materials ranging from metals, debris, earplugs and tampons to leaves and stones. This slowed-down machine defies all logics of efficiency, productivity or delivery, seeming instead to reattune itself to the messier, entropic yet generative essence of nature.
The section closes with Christian Nyampeta’s workshops and a growing library developed between New York and Gwangju. Inspired by the Gwangju Citizens’ Art School, a self-organized initiative active from 1983 to 1992 and closely connected to the Minjung movement, his project treats art less as the production of objects than as a way of gathering, learning and producing knowledge.
Preparing the transition to the next dimension of awareness, Sunik Kim fills the corridor with The Light in the Factory (2026), a 496-hour composition that begins with the Gwangju Biennale’s opening and ends only when the exhibition closes. The work draws from a banned musical drama about industrial labor and union repression that circulated clandestinely on cassette through student, worker and church networks, degrading slightly with every copy. Played from the building’s emergency room, the sound seeps through the walls and into the ramp as a ghost, allowing those memories to persist while measuring the passing of time.
At that point, the show finally lands in “Cosmos and Change,” where visitors are invited to embrace the notion of deep time beyond human perspective, moving through the collective subconscious, ancestral memory and planetary cycles.
This gallery is intentionally more cinematic and immersive, dominated by moving image, sound and dance. Across it, ritual becomes a way of exceeding the individual self, through collective movement, ancestral memory or an imagined connection with the cosmos.
There could probably be no better opening to this gallery than Lu Yang’s techno-shamanism. Across four videos, DOKU becomes an avatar moving through states of consciousness, death, transformation and reincarnation, re-enchanting the machine as a tool for spiritual inquiry and a vehicle for new, fluid imaginative possibilities that allow us to embrace temporal and spatial dimensions beyond the self.
The dialogue between the geological nature of the Jeju stones and We Sang brings us back toward ancient rituals and a profound tactile and emotional connection with the earth in moments of creation.
An attempt to restore a sense of ritual recurs throughout the section, from the Ganggangsullae dances as a way of binding bodies to one another, to the earth and to larger cycles of time.
Another work, by Bhenji Ra, originated from her travels to the southern Philippines to reconnect with a distant relative, Sitti Airia Sangkula Askalani-Obeso, and learn pangalay, a traditional Tausug dance. Part travelogue, dance lesson, ritual and dream, the film treats gesture as a language capable of carrying kinship across generations.
On a similar level, Sohrab Hura’s photographs bring that ecstatic dimension into the charged festivities dedicated to Kali on the Tamil Nadu coast, where devotees gather at night by the sea to celebrate the goddess simultaneously associated with destruction and renewal, within an ancestral worldview in which dissolution is never simply an ending.
Drawing from the shifting memory of Al-Muqanna, the enigmatic eighth-century “Veiled One,” remembered across Central Asia as prophet, rebel and revolutionary, Saodat Ismailova’s Melted into the Sun (2024) also stages a mythology of light and renewal, reconnecting with cosmic cycles. The sun becomes both image and force, illumination, destruction, disappearance and renewal, through which history continually dissolves and reforms.
That movement culminates in Rafik Greiss’s video The Longest Sleep (2024), which returns obsessively to the circle, from spinning wonder wheels and amusement park rides to galaxies, solar systems and black holes. Through repetition and collective motion, each circle opens into another, larger one. Single bodies become orbits, briefly escaping their individual limits.
Evoking the 3.2-million-year-old ancestral skeleton, Rossella Biscotti’s Lucy closes this arc by pulling us back toward the only material reality we ultimately possess: the body made of bones, but connected to an entire human and cosmic history. Flesh disappears, the skeleton remains, but life persists precisely through its ability to transform into new matter, as particles recirculate through new cycles of matter and energy.
In a sense, Lu Yang’s DOKU already contains the logic of the entire room. Storytelling and ritual, technology and dance become different means of reaching toward the same unstable truths: that life is inseparable from death, transformation from loss and the individual body from the collective histories, memories and cosmic cycles moving through it.
The epilogue is “Air and Articulation,” embracing and breathing a newly gained awareness of being part of a broader whole. The final gallery turns to breath, rhythm and change, becoming almost a membrane between the exhibition and the world outside. At its center is Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s labyrinthine installation Not Exactly BPM (Variation Rrose) (2026), a deconstructed club environment built from air blowers, transparent inflatables and a multi-channel techno composition. The transparent columns evoke both a space and a crowd, while spatial awareness becomes inner awareness, feeling the beat that traverses all things. The pulse of life, the pulse of relentless transformation. Inside and outside, pulse and breath become temporarily impossible to separate, offering a physical experience of the porous essence of our existence, never as single entities but as part of a broader universe of vital relations.
National pavilions and China-Taiwan tensions
With the ambition of becoming the Asian “Venice Biennale,” in 2018 the Gwangju Biennale began introducing national pavilions into its structure. From only three participating international organizations, this year it reached 28 pavilions involving 27 countries, cities and cultural organizations. Given the state of the world today, this outdated structure resulted in rising tensions, with much of the news around the Biennale ending up concentrated on the naming dispute over the Taiwanese presentation, which escalated into a diplomatic controversy.
Organizers had initially agreed to call it the “Taiwan Pavilion” but later changed the designation in official materials to “NTMoFA Pavilion,” after the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, prompting protests from Taiwan’s culture ministry and participating artists, who accused the Biennale of political censorship.
After several days of pressure, the Gwangju Biennale Foundation reversed course on August 25 and restored the name “Taiwan Pavilion.” That decision then triggered objections from China, which considers Taiwan part of its territory under the One China principle. The Chinese curatorial team withdrew from the Biennale and stopped installing its pavilion, while China’s diplomatic representatives formally protested the decision.
Inevitably, the controversy surrounding the Taiwan Pavilion dominated the opening press conference. The first and central question addressed the escalating tensions between Taiwan and China over the pavilion’s renaming, the subsequent Chinese withdrawal and the absence, until then, of a statement from the artistic director.
The initial response from the Foundation did little to clarify what had really happened, leaving room for all manner of speculation. Addressing the question during the conference, the Gwangju Biennale president was similarly vague, if not confused, describing the situation as “very pitiful” and “a shame,” and returning once again to the bureaucratic process behind the original naming decision as the main cause of the mess. Once again, he concluded by asking journalists not to escalate the controversy into a diplomatic conflict.
He admitted that the system for approving and organizing national pavilions may need to be improved in the future, without even questioning whether the national-pavilion model itself might be the real problem to dissolve, being by now structurally outdated, particularly when geopolitical disputes so readily overtake artistic considerations.
Artistic director Ho Tzu Nyen, meanwhile, emphasized the independence of the main exhibition and responded less to the administrative specifics than to the broader tension between art and politics. “Against the world of politics, art sometimes seems weak. The power of art seems weak and powerless,” he said. “But at the same time, I believe otherwise, that art has power, but the power extends over long durations and beyond the narrow focus of our limited attention span.”
Returning to one of the Biennale’s central ideas, the different scales and temporalities through which change occurs, Ho also argued that public attention is inevitably drawn toward rupture, controversy and sudden political events, while art often works more slowly. “If I were to think back about the Greeks, for example, what do I remember of the Greeks? I remember Homer,” he said. “If I think of the Renaissance, I think of the masterpieces of Michelangelo and Raffaello. I think that art transforms humans in a profound, slow, enduring way,” he stated, in an attempt to refocus attention on the core of the event as a cultural platform of human exchange through art.
Ho asked the room to return its attention to the exhibition itself and its 43 artists: “I believe we are all gathered here today for art. I hope we can respect what art is.” Overall, Ho’s was a philosophically consistent answer, while leaving the practical questions raised by the pavilion dispute largely unresolved. Most importantly: yes, art should transcend political tensions and create a space for dialogue, but art, like any human expression, is also inherently political, able to take or suggest a position different from dominant narratives and ideologies, helping us see reality in another way, and to open questions and debate.
This political function of art is practically impossible to ignore or negate on a stage such as the Gwangju Biennale. Founded in 1994 to commemorate the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement, the Biennale champions human rights, democracy and community.
Visiting the Taiwan Pavilion, one could feel how the continuous threat of Chinese invasion hangs over life in the country. Titled “Instance Dungeons: Gray Zone,” the exhibition uses the video-game concept of an “instance dungeon,” an isolated environment that can be entered repeatedly, as a metaphor for Taiwan’s geopolitical condition. The menace of war, surveillance, cyberattacks and information manipulation dominates the digital-heavy presentation, featuring works by Su Hui-Yu, Li Yi-Fan, Cheng Hsien-Yu, Hsu Che-Yu & Chen Wan-Yin, Ting-Ting Cheng, Chang Wen-Hsuan, Lin Yu-Liang and Juan Po-Yuan.
Taiwan was not the only pavilion to address anxieties around China’s growing influence in the region. At the Philippines Pavilion, a large mural by Tambisan sa Sining (Dialectical Interaction Through Art), a multidisciplinary activist collective founded in 1979, depicts workers tearing down both the U.S. and Chinese flags. Staged resonantly within the archives of May 18, the pavilion links the Philippines’ own struggle for democracy to the unresolved fragility of democratic systems today.
Historical works by Jose Tence Ruiz, Federico “BoyD” Dominguez and Cap Reyes trace a generation of Social Realists who emerged from the 1970s through the early 1980s, as the country moved from dictatorship toward People Power. More recent works bring that history into the present, confronting enforced disappearances, massacres and other forms of state violence that continue to shape Philippine society.
For Ides Macapanpan, this history is also personal. Her mother, environmental activist Vertudez “Daisy” Macapanpan, was arrested in 2022 after publicly opposing a major hydropower project in Laguna. Her installation turns toward the larger history of the desaparecidos, covering a wall with the names of those forcibly disappeared and invoking the roughly 1,800 people who have vanished since the Marcos dictatorship. Absence becomes overwhelming precisely through accumulation: each name restoring individuality to what can otherwise disappear into the abstraction of a statistic.
Jef Carnay’s performance channels the frustration, anxiety and accumulated pressure of these histories into a ritual of collective release. At its center is a soft, heart-shaped sculpture activated by the audience as a vessel for emotion: feelings are released, recorded and eventually recirculated, deposited into a mural that becomes a testament to student fights and struggles.
Most of the works never made it to Gwangju, reportedly because of problems at customs, organizers said, or perhaps just another sign of the broader climate of censorship and repression facing critical and oppositional voices.
Other pavilions turned instead into platforms of intercultural dialogue and exchange, pairing their national artists with Korean counterparts and encouraging the fertile cross-cultural confrontation that has long shaped and nourished human culture.
Titled “The Look Is A Li(k)e,” the Italian Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale focuses on shared pressures around appearance, identity and social performance that developed in both countries following similar influences of the American system in the postwar period, amid rapid modernization and increasingly globalized systems of consumption and image-making. Curated by Irene Capolmi, the pavilion explores the relational and political dimension of “looking”: we construct ourselves through the gaze of others, through imported models, local traditions and the constant negotiation between conformity and deviation.
Davide Stucchi’s readymades of mundane objects reenact the performative dimension of identity, reassigning functions to the inanimate world and turning objects into characters, showing how identities change according to context, use and perception. SAGG Napoli explores discipline and self-measurement. In AMEN (2021), archery becomes a ritual of correction, while the drone’s gaze intensifies the unsettling experience of watching oneself from outside. Korean artist Dew Kim turns to queer identity under heteronormative and digital pressure. In Legion, Nowhere Whole (2026), fragmented bodies draw on BDSM aesthetics and Christian iconography, using incompleteness as a refusal of legibility and control.
Meanwhile, Ru Kim shifts the question toward authority. In Tails of Courage, or the Master’s Pirouette (2026), a master abandoned by the pink dog he once dominated gradually begins to imitate it, exposing power as something dependent on the very subject it seeks to control. The pavilion closes with a platform for community and relational exchange by Raffaela Naldi Rossano: with Partenope’s Blind Date Room (2026), she creates an imaginative room between Naples and Korea, combining elements from both countries and creating a stage where identity can take shape through its interrelational essence, proximity, negotiation and physical encounter.
Similarly staging a dialogue between Polish and Korean artists, the Polish Pavilion approaches transformation as a condition shared across cultures. The works on view intersect and meet around rituals of passage, spirituality and memory, exploring how older symbolic systems can still help navigate change in societies where collective rites have largely fragmented.
Park Saengkwang’s vivid colors and spiritual imagery reconnect painting with Korean folk culture and shamanic ritual, entering into dialogue with Urszula Broll’s transcendental drawings, where symbolic landscapes and gateways become spaces for contemplation and passage between different states of being. Working with silk and ceramics, Alicja Bielawska creates a more physical threshold, making transformation something experienced through perception and through the body moving in space. Inside Job’s Ula Lucińska and Michał Knychaus similarly create skeletal, rib-like structures as portals, bringing past infrastructures into contact with imagined futures.
The pavilion closes with a symbolically powerful work by Broll that carries a fundamental invitation, resonating with the entire exhibition: “Let’s go to the other shore.” An invitation to go beyond the self, beyond the limits of our individual, body- and time-bound perspective, to embrace change on a more universal level, conceiving ourselves as a broader, fluid ecosystem of relations to honor and guard.
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