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Alternative visions: in a provocative curatorial gesture, this year's Gwangju Biennale was largely dedicated to—and determined by—independent artist groups and alternative spaces - Report From Gwangju - Critical Essay
Art in America, Nov, 2002 by Jonathan Napack
"Basically," a harried Hou Hanru let slip, as preparations for the 2002 Gwangju Biennale threatened to descend into chaos, "you could call my strategy `Fuck the Museum.'" Hou's provocative joke--or was it?--somehow captures the spirit of the event's Project 1, "Pause," one of the most unusual exhibitions ever to sneak past a budget committee. Hou and co-curator Charles Esche didn't stop at breaking one mold; they chose to shatter several--and all at the same time. The result was both inspiring and infuriating, a white-hot confusion of frustrating dead ends and new insights.
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"Pause" was one of four major divisions in this year's Biennale. The deeply moving Project 3, "Stay of Execution," consisted of site-specific installations by Korean artists inside a former military prison. (Gwangju was the site of a 1976 massacre considered by Koreans a milestone in the country's bloody progress toward democracy.) Project 2 dealt with the Korean diaspora. Project 4 brought together artists and architects to reconstruct an area of abandoned rail tracks.
But it was Project 1--by far the largest component of the biennial and the only one to include foreign artists or to deal with international issues in any significant way--that had to be considered the show's principal showcase. It was a collaboration between Paris-based independent curator Hou--best known for his touring exhibition "Cities on the Move" (1997-2000; co-curated with Hans-Ulrich Obrist) and a member of Francesco Bonami's 2003 Venice Biennale team--and Esche, the director of the Rooseum contemporary art center in Malmo, Sweden, and a member of the Protoacademy in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Biennale's artistic director, Wan-kyung Sung, is also listed as co-curator.
Hou and Esche seemed to want to subvert both Eurocentrism--with its fellow traveler, a certain patronizing exoticism--and "the museum" as an institution. In much of Asia, these two issues are deeply intertwined. Recent years have seen a proliferation of artist-run or alternative spaces; they fill the gap left by museums, which occupy a less central position here than in the West.
The reasons for this difference are many. Museum-going as a habit--long connected to peculiarly European notions of urban planning and leisure--never took root in most Asian societies, where secular public space is associated with commerce, not culture. But postcolonial politics also play a large role. Dozens of museums were built in Japan and, to a lesser extent, Korea during the "Asian Tiger" boom years in order to accommodate nationalistic aspirations to "greatness" and equal status with the West. But while magnificent infrastructure was created, programming was neglected. Entrenched conservatism and consensus-oriented politics meant that adventurous ideas stood little chance in official venues. And now, in the post-boom period, very few institutions can afford to generate their own shows--the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, for example, employs more than a dozen "curators" to unpack traveling exhibitions. (Even the recent Mariko Mori survey was organized by Milan's Prada Foundation.) Only recently has this advanced nation brought its museums' technical facilities up to the level required for such international loans.
So, for many artists, alternative spaces are the only option--and it is in such venues that interesting art is being shown. "[These countries] need to get away from `the museum' as the focus of arts policy," Hou said during a lull in the installation. "It's hard, because many see it as the key to success and/or recognition. But they should channel resources to the grass roots, where things are really happening."
That point of view inspired Esche and Hou to seek out--instead of individual artists--whole rosters from alternative spaces and artist collectives. Inviting these groups to Project 1, they hoped, would overcome the usual institutional inertia and make room for innovators from often-ignored parts of the globe. It would also reverse a general trend of ever-more-authoritarian shows, where critical theses seem to take precedence over actual works of art. It was as if Esche and Hou wanted to insert a firewall between the curators and the artists--and their solution was the artists' space.
Of course, it couldn't be that simple. But Esche and Hou managed to preserve the essence of their idea. They brought in as designer Beijing architect Chang Yong Ho, who along with Seoul's Kim Young Jun devised a structure to nestle within the Biennale hall: a forest of steel and plywood erected to mimic the spatial dynamics of cities.
"We decided on a three-layered approach," explained Hou. "Individual artists, collective works and `pavilions.'" Twenty-six alternative spaces would participate; they were required only to reproduce their floor plan (as imaginatively as they might like, of course). Fifteen "pavilions," artist-architect collaborations, would connect different parts of the exhibition and extend into the surrounding city. With so much choice out of the curators' hands--even decisions about the number of artists to be included as representatives of a given alternative space--Esche and Hou succeeded in building a bottom-up structure. They also, perhaps inevitably, created a logistical disaster.
