Resilience of Culture: In S Korea, curators keen to stage art show amid pandemic

“It’s been a long journey,” Ayas said, as she caught her breath. Factoring in coronavirus-induced postponements, she and her co-artistic director, Natasha Ginwala, have been developing their edition of the Gwangju Biennale for more than two years. 

Originally scheduled to open last September, and then in February, “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning” is now on tap for April 1. The most closely watched art biennial in Asia, the exhibition has been integral to South Korea’s efforts to boost its contemporary art scene. Next week, its curators will be back in Berlin, where they are based. (Ginwala is an associate curator at the Gropius Bau museum; Ayas, a curator-at-large for the V-A-C Foundation, of Moscow and Venice.) Each spent two weeks in quarantine after flying into South Korea to prep the show. It will close after a mere 39 days, on May 9 — about half its intended duration. The Venice Biennale, in contrast, runs for seven luxurious months. 

But as other international exhibitions have opted for longer delays, Ginwala and Ayas have plowed ahead, buoyed by South Korea’s comparatively successful management of the pandemic, which has allowed art fairs and exhibitions to open during periods of eased social distancing. The curators wanted “to set an example of doing things in a way that sustains and responds to this moment,” Ginwala said, sitting behind a plastic barrier in a biennial office. Over the past few decades, biennials have been arenas for networking, as curators, collectors, dealers and artists descended on far-flung cities to share information and cut deals. Gwangju’s show now attracts a fraction of the 1.6 million who attended the first one, in 1995, but “it has become one of the more prominent destinations on the biennale circuit,” Joan Kee, an art history professor at the University of Michigan, said. Over the years, the biennial has hired top-flight curators like Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s artistic director, and Okwui Enwezor, who died in 2019. The show has “played a role in the appreciation by the global art world of what Korea has to offer in terms of artists, galleries, non-profits and institutions,” said Pat Lee, a director at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul, about two hours north by high-speed train. 

Attendees at Gioni’s 2010 edition recalled alighting at Jayu (“Freedom”), a since-closed dance hall that billed itself as the largest club in Asia, according to Lee (who helped plan the party), with “many surreal things like opening rooftops, cascading bubbles, DJ platforms coming down from the roof.” It was a pretty good night out in the country’s sixth-largest city. The 2021 outing will, inevitably, be a more low-key affair. Of the 69 artists and groups selected to fill four venues, only three braved the quarantine to install on site. Ayas said she and Ginwala looked for art that embodies forms of intelligence, “from the heart, from streams of consciousness that are ancestral, that are cosmological” — and that takes up issues like AI and “collective modes of solidarity that you might find in Indigenous contexts or in matriarchal cultures.” “The biennale is almost set up now as a television studio where the procession is being recorded,” Ayas said. The reality was that most viewers and most of the artists — will only experience the exhibition online.