10000 Lives - Gwangju Biennale, South Korea

The Eighth Gwangju Biennale was the best I have seen so far. Tightly packaged under the title ’10000 Lives’, the Biennale explored the ubiquitous nature of images and our obsessive, iconophilic relationships with them. Included amongst the works by 134 artists are relics, cultural artifacts, newspaper clippings, found photographs, documentation and even spirit drawings which push the boundaries of what constitute art and imagery in a world so dominated by pictures that are ravenously consumed and then often easily discarded.

The Biennale was divided up into seven sections, with each exploring a different facet of image making. Gallery 1 of the Biennale Hall dealt with ‘photographic representation, posing, and the construction of the self through images’ (M. Gioni, Curator). Such processes were presented in numerous ways, from the opening tableaus of on-line communities coming together in the real world, to an uncanny photograph of a 19-year-old Norma Jean Baker (later Marilyn Monroe) with a sheet over her head in an interpretation of death, to Sherrie Levine’s appropriations of Walker Evans’ FSA Documentary photographs alongside the originals, and finally to an intriguing and insightfully humorous video exploring the mechanics of the family portrait from Korean artist Heungsoon Im.

Gallery 2 explored ‘the mechanics of vision through optical illusions and para-scientific imaginaries’ (Gioni) and contained Thomas Bayrle’s psychedelic superforms, Sars drawings from Chinese healer and artist Guo Fengyi, ultra high-speed photographs from electrical engineer Harold Edgerton, and a video of blind people painting murals, amongst numerous others.

The most confronting was Gallery 3, which brought together ‘works that deal with the representation of heroes and martyrs, the way images are used to create myths, preserve memory, or bear witness to war and oppression’ (Gioni). Here, national and global events were explored; such as the Holocaust, the funeral of RFK, pro-democracy rallies in Korea, the war in Afghanistan and prison photographs of inmates at Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge’s school of torture, taken by a 16-year-old ‘photographer in chief.’

Perhaps the most moving, confronting, and conflicting work in the Biennale was the Rent Collection Courtyard, originally made in the 1960s. These 114 life-size bronze sculptures tell the story of the hardship and exploitation endured by a village of peasants at the hand of a corrupt landlord. These peasants then rise up against the landlord and overthrow their oppressor. Walking through this narrative tableaux brought me to tears as I witnessed the back-breaking labour performed by children and their grandparents, saw the expressions of exhausted defeat in their delicately carved-out features, and felt the overwhelming heartbreak of mothers whose children are ripped from their arms. My feelings of compassion and outrage were quickly compromised, however, after I read that this collection was the visual catalyst for Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a regime no less harsh, oppressive and tyrannical than that of village landlords. I still don’t know what to think of this work. On its own, it tells a powerful story of the indignities of such a skewed class system, but viewed in its historical context, the work is then given sinister and malevolent undertones, and I am disinclined to sympathise with its cause.

Gallery 4 looked at ‘religious figures and idols, fetishes and dolls’ (Gioni). This was the weakest of all the exhibits, with two rooms dedicated to a random display of images and sculptures of dolls and doll parts, and another two intricately-constructed rooms dedicated to a museological presentation of 3000 found photographs of teddy bears. Gallery 5 presented ‘idiosyncratic perspectives on the structures of cinema and television’ (Gioni) and had, as its main display, a video of people performing day-to-day tasks suspended upside down. This offered light relief after the journey through the Biennale Hall. The Folk Museum brought together works that ‘address the interaction of images and memory’; and finally the Museum of Art focused on ‘self-portraiture and images as projections of the self’ (Gioni).

It was an epic mission just to sustain oneself physically, psychologically and retinally through this mass bombardment of images. But it was well worth the trek. The meticulous organisation of the show under the subheadings, and the well-guided arrows which led audiences through the exhibition, as through an Ikea show room, made it possible for us to absorb, contemplate and fall in love with (or question) as many works as our mental capacities could handle. Given the enormity of the theme and its almost infinite possibilities, this was a show that could have been drowned out by the power of its own ideas. But it wasn’t. Instead, Gioni has created a stunning curatorial masterpiece which, on the one hand neatly categorises images under easily-digestible sub-headings, but simultaneously continues the discourse surrounding the finesse and nuances of image-making and art-creation. [Image of Rent Collection from http://artradarjournal.com/; image of Teddy Bear Project from http://angelfloresjr.multiply.com/]