Skip to main content

WHERE TO HOW TO

GWANGJU AND TAIPEI BIENNALES IN REVIEW

Vivian Ziherl
Eyeline 73
The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

As the dust settled on either side of the East China Sea, two exhibitions emerged as the highlights of the 2010 Asian Biennale season—each bearing the signature of one of the young male rising-stars of the current international curatorial scene. Presenting not only well executed exhibitions but strong responses to the problem of the biennale scenario, Massimiliano Gioni’s Gwangju Biennale and the co-curated Taipei Biennale of Tirdad Zolghadr and Hongjohn Lin differed starkly in their rationale, methodology, scale and sensibility. They were the exhibitions of the classicist and the iconoclast and yet, paradoxically, they shared a strong grounding in the museum institution—neither offering the treasure hunt through ruins, derelict areas or satellite sites that has become something of a biennale style.

Gioni’s Gwangju Biennale stood as a handsome exhibition that proposed the biennale as a temporary museum: one that set scale in direct tension with structure. Refined and strict to purpose, its five main halls and three additional museum venues were meticulously assembled into sensitive conjunctions of works which created thematic echoes throughout the exhibition’s massive floor-space. Nothing if not ambitious, the exhibition took as its task ‘the image’—this thematic grounded, in turn, in the local context with the title ‘10,000 Lives’ borrowed from the epic poem of South Korean Ko Un.1

A chief achievement of 10,000 Lives was simply its ability to maintain the interest of the viewer over such a vast scale and density. The exhibition relied on loans from art and historical collections alike, with works by Hans Bellmer, Sherrie Levine, Walker Evans, Sturtevant, Tehching Hsieh and Oh Yoon set amongst more recent contemporary art works, ex voto objects and a large amount of documentary photography... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Zhao Shutong, Wang Guanyi and the Rent Collection Courtyard Collective, The Rent Collection Courtyard, 1965. Installation detail, 10,000 Lives: The Eighth Gwangju Biennale, 2010. 103 copper-plated fibreglass sculptures. Courtesy Gwangju Biennale.

Zhao Shutong, Wang Guanyi and the Rent Collection Courtyard Collective, The Rent Collection Courtyard, 1965. Installation detail, 10,000 Lives: The Eighth Gwangju Biennale, 2010. 103 copper-plated fibreglass sculptures. Courtesy Gwangju Biennale.

Hans Bellmer, La Poupée, 1934. Gelatin silver print, 9 x 6cm © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York & Galerie Berinson, Berlin

Hans Bellmer, La Poupée, 1934. Gelatin silver print, 9 x 6cm © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York & Galerie Berinson, Berlin