In September 2026, the 16th Gwangju Biennale opened in South Korea — one of the most prominent contemporary art exhibitions in Asia. This year it offers the viewer an unusual experience: to slow down.
The biennale runs from 5 September to 15 November at the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall. The artistic director is the Singaporean artist and curator Ho Tzu Nyen. Together with the curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee and Brian Kuan Wood, he has assembled 43 artists and artistic groups from 22 countries.
For a biennale of such scale, the number of participants seems unexpectedly small. And that is precisely one of the main gestures of the current edition. Ho Tzu Nyen deliberately reduced the number of participants compared with previous editions. As a result, this is the Gwangju Biennale with the smallest number of artists in its entire history. At the same time, many of the authors have been given the opportunity to show several works at once and to present their practice in far greater detail.
The result is an interesting shift of scale: fewer artists — more space, more time and more attention for each work.
“You Must Change Your Life”
The title of the biennale — You Must Change Your Life — is taken from the famous final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” written in 1908.
In the poem, Rilke describes an antique torso of Apollo. The sculpture has no head, yet the poem’s protagonist feels such a powerful presence of life within it that the encounter with the work ends with the phrase: “You must change your life.”
For Ho Tzu Nyen, this line became not a ready-made call but a starting point for a conversation about change. The exhibition does not offer the viewer a single correct answer to the question of what exactly should be changed. Something else matters far more: what happens when a person is given enough time to truly look.
Not to move quickly on to the next room. Not to read the label and put a mental check mark. But to linger beside a work, to notice its material, its scale, its sound, one’s own reaction — and, perhaps, to return to it once more.
It is attention that becomes one of the main materials of this biennale.
Five galleries — from the molecule to the cosmos
The main exhibition is divided into five galleries. Their names form a kind of map of movement: from matter and the human body to relationships, the earth, the cosmos and, finally, air and sound.
Gallery 1 — Molecules and Me begins at the smallest scale.
Here is Resin Pond by Goldin+Senneby — almost two tons of pine resin poured directly onto the floor. The material occupies the space and literally changes the visitor’s movement: the usual route has to be walked around. The work also has a personal dimension. It is connected to the experience of one member of the duo, who lives with multiple sclerosis, and so the conversation about matter gradually turns to the body, its vulnerability and its capacity to adapt.
Beside them appear volcanic stones from Jeju Island. They seem to carry the conversation into an entirely different timescale — one where change is measured no longer by a human life, but by geological processes.
Gallery 2 — Bodies and Bonds turns to the body and to relationships between people. What matters here is repetition, discipline, closeness, care, and the tension that arises within human connections.
Gallery 3 — Landscapes and Learning expands the scale to land, labour and collective experience.
Gallery 4 — Cosmos and Change looks even further. Dream, memory, ancestors and planetary time make it possible to imagine change on scales that far exceed a human life.
Gallery 5 — Air and Articulations seems gradually to free the space from materiality. Here the work of Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork is especially noticeable Not Exactly BPM (Variation Rrose) (2026) — a large-scale installation combining sound, sculpture and a multichannel techno composition. The space resembles at once an architectural structure and a labyrinth, while sound becomes a physical part of the surrounding environment.
When time becomes part of art
This is especially interesting in works that cannot be seen in their entirety within a few minutes.
Angela Goh performs Craft (2026) four times a day. At the centre of the work are the human body and small, repeated movements that gradually turn into a full-fledged choreographic composition.
In Sunik Kim’s work, the scale of time becomes almost literal. The Light in the Factory (2026) lasts 496 hours — exactly as long as the public programme of the main exhibition continues. The work is connected to the history of industrial labour and the repression of workers, and its sound spreads through the biennale building throughout the entire exhibition period.
There is another temporal gesture as well — Apologies James T. Hong. It is an almost eleven-hour compilation of public apologies by political leaders, which is projected onto the façade of the building in the evenings.
Such works cannot be "closed" with a single glance. You can come at the beginning and see only a fragment. You can return later. You can hear a work before you see it. You can spend far more time beside it than you originally planned.
And here an important difference of the current Gwangju Biennale emerges: time ceases to be merely the duration of a visit and becomes part of the artistic experience.
Gwangju: personal change and the memory of the city
This idea also has a particular context. The Gwangju Biennale was founded in 1995, 15 years after the democratic uprising of 18 May 1980, which became a crucial part of the city's history. Therefore the conversation about change in Gwangju inevitably exists simultaneously on the personal and the public level.
One of the most powerful examples is the May Mothers House project. It is a community of women whose lives were deeply affected by the events of 1980. Since 2022 they have been working with the artist Joo Hong in art workshops. The biennale presents 322 paintings created in the course of this process.
Here change acquires a completely different scale. It can be personal. It can take place in the body. It can be expressed in repeated movement or artistic practice. And it can gradually become part of collective memory.
What remains after the exhibition
You Must Change Your Life sounds like a very categorical title. But the biennale itself turns out to be far more delicate than this phrase.
It does not explain to the viewer what their life should become after the visit. Instead, it offers time. Time to examine the material. To hear the sound. To observe repeated movement. To return to a work that was difficult to understand at first.
In this sense, change at the Gwangju Biennale occurs not only in the subjects of the works. It is embedded in the very organisation of the exhibition: in the smaller number of participants, in the opportunity to spend more time with art, and in works that reveal themselves gradually.
And perhaps that is precisely why the main question of this biennale sounds especially precise today.
What are we capable of seeing when attention becomes more focused?
The Gwangju Biennale 2026 answers it not with a single work and not with a single concept. It answers with the very rhythm of the exhibition. Less haste. More time beside art. More space for change.
