Art

Sixteen Countries and Eleven Institutions

An empty modern exhibition hall at dusk: bare concrete walls with nothing hung on them, a polished pale floor, several closed wooden shipping crates against the far wall, and beyond a tall glass wall a long row of slender bare flagpoles standing empty in a paved forecourt under a low amber sky.

The 16th Gwangju Biennale opens to the public this weekend under the title You Must Change Your Life and runs to 15 November. The thing that consumed its summer is not in the show. It is a caption.

Taiwan’s National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts proposed, contracted and prepared its contribution under the name Taiwan Pavilion. Sometime before July the biennale’s promotional material began saying NTMoFA Pavilion instead — the museum’s acronym. Taiwan’s foreign ministry noticed the change in early July, the culture ministry objected publicly on 9 August, and on 15 August ten of the participating artists issued a joint statement headed “The Censored Taiwan Pavilion,” asking why “a biennale founded on the historical values of democracy, human rights and the ‘Gwangju spirit'” should politically restrict participants’ self-identification (e-flux). The Foundation’s account, when it arrived, was administrative: promotional materials “use either the country name or the institutional name, according to the type of participant” (ArtReview). Late in August, after an ultimatum from Taipei, the original name went back. On 3 September, two days before the preview, the Chinese pavilion team withdrew, the Guangzhou delegation cancelled its visit, and the city of Zhoushan dropped a plan to promote its 2027 island expo from the same building (The Korea Herald). China’s consulate general in Gwangju said the decision had “openly allowed the Taiwan region of China to participate… using a name that is completely inconsistent with its status.” South Korea’s foreign ministry replied that its position on Taiwan was unchanged and that this was a cultural matter unrelated to it (Taipei Times).

Read that sequence again for what is missing from it. At no point did anyone dispute a work, an artist, a room, a loan or a wall. Two months of institutional effort, three ministries and an embassy went into one line of display text, and the only material result is that one participant’s exhibition will not now be installed.

The pavilion is not native to art exhibitions. Venice ran its first Biennale in 1895 with everyone together in a single building and no national divisions at all, and it worked — more than 200,000 visitors that year, more than 300,000 by 1899 (La Biennale di Venezia). The nations were retrofitted onto that success. Belgium built the first foreign pavilion in 1907; Hungary, Germany and Britain followed in 1909. What got borrowed was the world’s-fair unit, the national court in which empires compared their manufactures, and what came with it was a precondition. Before anything can be hung, a list of who is exhibiting has to exist, and in this format that list is a list of states.

Which means the one part of an exhibition nobody thinks of as curated is the part that has to clear a foreign ministry.

Venice learned this the hard way and published the result. Taipei Fine Arts Museum showed as Taiwan’s national pavilion from 1995 until 2003, when, under pressure from Beijing, the Biennale removed it from the national participations; it has been a collateral event ever since, at the Palazzo delle Prigioni, a building international artists still informally call the Taiwan Pavilion (TFAM). In 2013 the curator Esther Lu titled the show there This is not a Taiwan Pavilion (e-flux). Gwangju launched its own Pavilion Project in 2018, fifteen years after the fault had been demonstrated at the most closely watched art exhibition on earth, and inherited it entire.

It inherited something else, which is that the category has never held together. Gwangju’s pavilions are reported this year as sixteen countries and eleven institutions (The Korea Times). The 2024 edition’s nine included Framer Framed, an art space in Amsterdam; the Swiss embassy; the Italian Cultural Institute in Seoul; the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, an Inuit co-operative in Canada; the Adam Mickiewicz Institute; and the National Museum of China (Gwangju Biennale Foundation). An Inuit co-operative and a national museum, filed under the same noun. The “type of participant” rule was not a convention the Foundation was following. It was a taxonomy it had to invent in July, because the word Pavilion asserts something about its occupant that half the occupants cannot supply.

None of which makes the artists’ complaint small — the opposite. The erasure stung because the label is not decoration, and anyone who wants to call the naming trivial has to explain why three governments treated it as anything but. The Foundation was in a real bind, and its statement of regret, that “differing positions among the parties concerned were not sufficiently reconciled at key stages,” is a sentence written by people who did not sign up for this. It is also the prose of a small foreign ministry, which is what a biennale becomes on the day it adopts the word.

And the form pays. Not the foundation, which carries the cost of running it, and not the artists. It pays the participating states, for whom a pavilion is the cheapest recognition a culture budget can buy: freight, an exhibition designer, a modest allocation, and in exchange a country’s name on a published list of countries, in a building, for ten weeks. Very little else an arts ministry funds returns that, which is why the format travelled from Venice to Gwangju and why nobody will retire it. The artists supply the contents and absorb the loss when it fails — this summer, a pavilion’s worth of preparation spent on a poster, and another pavilion’s work sitting in its crates.

What I would watch for is whether Gwangju quietly keeps the word. The exit is available and costs nothing: call them projects, call them partners, let the list be a list of the organisations that actually turned up. My guess is that it will not be taken, because the word is what the funders came for.

Ho Tzu Nyen’s main exhibition, meanwhile, is forty-three artists and groups in a single hall (The Korea Times). Its title is the last line of Rilke’s poem about an archaic torso: a fragment that has lost the head and the eyes it would need in order to look at you, and looks at you anyway. The exhibition wrapped around it spent August settling which of its guests were countries. That was decided before a single object went on a wall, by a foundation, an embassy and a printing deadline — and the notice had been hanging in Venice, under a title, since 2013.

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