Arts Festival ‘for Everyone’ Arises at Gwangju, Where in 1980 Korea’s Army Massacred 200 Protesters

For three months every two years South Korea’s city of dissent, of hostility to the central government, of resentment of bureaucrats and politicians in Seoul, bursts into bloom as an Eden of the arts. The Gwangju Biennale spreads from the main exhibition hall to pavilions around the city featuring individual national displays to a neighborhood of little shops selling mostly the creations of local artists along with coffee, tea, and snacks.It’s not political at all,” says the president of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation, Park Yang-woo. “It’s for everyone.”That strains credulity, considering that more than 90 percent of the voters in Gwangju, population 1.5 million, vote for candidates of the Minju or Democratic Party, whose sizable majority in the national assembly is calling for the impeachment of Korea’s conservative president, Yoon Suk-yeol. He was elected by an eyelash in 2022, defeating a left-leaning candidate, Lee Jae-myung, who swept the entire southwestern Cholla region, including the two Cholla provinces and Gwangju, an independent city.The vision of Gwangju as an international arts center is all the more remarkable considering that the city was the scene for ten days in May 1980 of an uprising that ended in a bloody army crackdown in which approximately 200 protesters, mostly young people, were killed. Nicolas Bourriaud. Gwangu FestivalMemories of the Gwangju massacre are immortalized in a large museum by a cemetery in which most of those killed are buried and in another museum in the former governor’s building, where the protesters made their headquarters before army troops killed or captured them on the last day.For the duration of the Biennale, however, Gwangju manages to sublimate that tragedy in a burst of creativity, both foreign and indigenous. This year the whole show in the Biennale Exhibition Hall was curated by a prominent French artistic director, Nicolas Bourriaud, all under the name, “Pansori, a soundscape of the 21st century.”That title conjures ancient Korean dramas categorized as pansori, done to the strains of loud chant-like singing and the banging of a drum. What better way, said Mr. Park, to “transform the entire area into a diverse and experimental site for culture and art.”Experimental is the word for displays by 72 artists conspiring to challenge whatever Mr. Bourriaud thinks is smothering them beneath the strictures and prejudices of conventional society. You won’t see anything so banal as a portrait or a landscape while gazing at works intended, we’re told, to tear down barriers to migration, segregation, social distancing, all that’s bad.“These seemingly dissimilar topics share a common point, which is space and its political organization,” a program helpfully explains to un-woke visitors. “Space is also a crossroads that connects all social issues, from feminism to decolonization and climate environment, as the division of space is always geopolitical.”Yet the Gwangju uprising more than 44 years ago is unmentioned. The festival, without specifically dwelling on the horrors of the past, evokes the independent outlook by which Gwangju and the surrounding Cholla provinces are known. Pansori, we are told, grew from Cholla culture centuries ago — an implicit reminder of the rebellious spirit of a region that still defies the powers-that-be ruling from Seoul.

Arts Festival ‘for Everyone’ Arises at Gwangju, Where in 1980 Korea’s Army Massacred 200 Protesters

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