How the Past Meets the Present at Gwangju Biennale
Long blades of unkempt green grass pad the fall of footsteps. Vines have overtaken the crumbling cement complex, and the sky is pleasantly overcast. The stillness evokes bucolic as an apt descriptor, and it contrasts the knowledge of knowing what has happened here. The former Armed Forces’ Gwangju Hospital, the site where activists involved in the May 18 Democratization Movement were covertly interrogated and tortured, was left to quietly decay since being abandoned in 2007. Now, it houses the GB Commission’s attempt to reconcile the past with the present, the local history with the global structures that undergird the Biennale itself.
The previous 2018 curation of assemblages inside the Armed Forces’ Gwangju Hospital by the GB Commission was criticized for failing to meaningfully grapple with site-specificity, a core part of a commission founded to explore the history and civil spirit of the city: all invited artists were male and non-Korean. In this 2021 iteration of the Hospital, political memory continues to haunt, and the installations do not allow you to forget the conditions of its haunting are intrinsically linked to place. Contrasting the dusty jagged edges of the broken doors and windows, the sloping daisy-filled path of Moon Seo Hee’s Asked and Unasked Stories feels like a temporary respite from the claustrophobic intensity of the hospital. A closer inspection of the audial testimonies accompanying these daisies, a plant known for its use in healing wounds, reveals the voices of children retelling the violence-laden experiences of people who attended elementary school in Gwangju. The contrast between the art and the environment that houses it once again becomes evocative through the 1,0000 canes of Lim Minouk’s installation, all meticulously sculpted by Korean War massacre survivor Chai Eun Jin. Under the fluorescent hospital lights, the hand-engraved canes emphasize the persistence of memory and the search for truth in the face of deliberate historical amnesia and national identity building.
Bae Young Hwan’s Popsong: March for the Beloved is the last artifact we encounter in the dimly lit hospital. The main source of light in the vestibule is the rectangle of sunlight gleaming just past the open entryway. It beckons us outside, but something about the blue-green glow from the cathode rays of the litany of televisions strewn on the floor keeps us transfixed. Among the televisions are sidewalk bricks provided by the city of Gwangju from its revitalization project to beautify the downtown neighborhood. The static resonance of the voices emanating from the work lingers in my mind, even after we leave. I learn that they are singing a song composed for activist Yoon Sang Won, killed in the May 18 demonstration, and labor organizer Park Ki Soon, who passed away before him. Perhaps this is the animism that Gwangju directorial team Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala speak of in the attempt to confront the increasing multi-national corporatization of the present moment. Then again, Gwangju Biennale itself is a product of cultural exportation. Perhaps its origins cannot be extricated from the Korean government’s project to situate its image in the global cultural sphere, a project maintained by erasure and violence.
As we walk through the city to the rest of the Biennale, I let my gaze rest a little longer on the sidewalk bricks underneath. They are reminders of a history that is always in the process of being made and unmade.