Three of Korea’s biggest annual contemporary art events are set to open this September: the Gwangju Biennale (Sep 2–Nov 6), the Busan Biennale (Sep 3–Nov 30), and Mediacity Seoul (Sep 1–Nov 20). Just in time for the 2016 biennale season, when the eyes of the international art word are turned on Korea, TheArtro has prepared an abundance of related content. In ‘2016 Korean Biennales at a Glance,’ the first such offering, we provide details on exhibition themes, participating artists, and other information that will be useful for visitors to the biennales. In the first week of September, TheArtro will make available the diverse content created by the Korea Arts Management Service in partnership with Art Asia Pacific for a special biennale edition of the Hong Kong–based art publication. Other articles will feature Korean artists who have participated in international biennales, including in Korea.

The theme of the eleventh Gwangju Biennale, led by Artistic Director Maria Lind (Director, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm), is “The Eighth Climate (What does art do?).” The notion of the eighth climate can be traced to the twelfth-century mystic and philosopher Sohravardi and refers to an “imaginal” world, existing beyond the seven climates into which astronomers once divided the earth and accessible through the imaginative faculties. The Gwangju Biennale seeks to make full use of the “imaginative capacity” of art to look ahead to the future and reflect on art’s fundamental role.

In line with this theme, artworks looking at a broad range of political and social issues, including history, memory, feminism, and the post-Internet era will be featured at the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall and other venues throughout the city. The different sections in the Exhibition Hall will have varying arrangements and numbers of works in order to create different moods. Among the featured works will be German artist Hito Steyerl’s installation ‘Factory of the Sun’ and Spanish artist Dora Garcia’s ‘Nokdu Bookstore for the Living and the Dead,’ which reproduces the bookshop that acted as a focal point of the May 18 Democracy Movement, as well as pieces by Lebanese media artist Walid Raad and French video artist Philippe Parreno.

A unique aspect of the eleventh Gwangju Biennale was the process-oriented planning and the curators’ efforts to collaborate with the local arts sector. A year in advance, Artistic Director Maria Lind began forming her diverse team of curators, and the team worked together to plan the exhibition. Researchers and participating artists worked together on site, got involved in collaborative regional projects, and also participated in educational programs at colleges and alternative schools. As an extension of ongoing reflections on art’s place in society, various channels will be opened for examination of this question, including monthly gatherings, Infra-School (Gwangju Biennale’s lecture and seminar series), and the eleventh Gwangju Biennale Forum.

This year’s Busan Biennale promises to be the biggest yet. In addition to the Busan Museum of Art, the venue of previous years, this year’s biennale will also be held at F1963, a nearly 10,000-square meter exhibition space set up in what was formerly the KISWIRE Suyeong Factory. An exhibition and various other programs will be held in the new multipurpose cultural space, where the look of the old factory has mostly been preserved.

This year’s biennale features two exhibits, titled Project 1 and Project 2; academic programs and seminars related to the exhibition theme, as well as a networking party and other events, which together constitute Project 3. Project 1, which will be held at the Busan Museum of Art, is called “an/other avant-garde china-japan-korea.” A product of collaborative planning by the biennale’s Chinese, Japanese, and Korean curators, Project 1 is a collection of experimental art from the three countries. Topics covered include the period of unrest and conflict in China, spanning from the Cultural Revolution to the “Beijing Spring” and the Tiananmen Square protests; the avant-garde period in Japan from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the late 1980s, including parts of the Gutai, Mono-ha, and Superflat movements; and the domain of experimental art in Korea from the sixties to the eighties, including conceptual art, happenings, and media art. This will be the first large-scale exhibition to shed light on avant-garde art in Asia, which has been underemphasized within the Eurocentric field of art history.

The theme of this year’s Busan Biennale, “Hybridizing Earth, Discussing Multitude,” is also the title of the Project 2 exhibition, personally overseen by Artistic Director Yun Cheagab. Featuring the works of fifty-six artist teams and individual artists, from twenty-three countries, this exhibition focuses on the biennale system within an age of multiplicity, a time characterized by increasingly global communities and continuous technological advancement. Artistic Director Yun said “the three-project biennale would explore the nature of the connection—continuity, discontinuity, or mixture—between the spontaneously formed, locally based pre-nineties avant-garde system and the post-nineties global biennale system.”

The title of Mediacity Seoul 2016, “Neriri Kiruru Harara,” comes from the poem “Two Billion Light Years of Solitude” by Tanikawa Shuntaro, which imagines the language of Martians. An expression of languages that are yet to come, “Neriri Kiruru Harara” is the key to understanding this year’s exhibition. Looking at the question of how undesirable legacies, like war, disaster, and poverty, can be transmuted into anticipation about the future, Mediacity Seoul 2016 proposes varied possibilities for the future as relayed through the language of art and through media.

Compared to previous years, this year’s exhibition features a higher proportion of young artists and female artists, as well as artists from Africa and Latin America. The selected works are by major artists in the international contemporary art scene, who represent a wide range of generations and cultural areas, including Pierre Huyghe of France, Eduardo Navarro of Argentina, the late Chantal Akerman of Belgium, Ben Russell of the United States, Marguerite Humeau of the UK, Eduardo Navarro’s performance creates through the movements of the body and of various tools a psychological landscape that breaks free of the system of language. The backdrop of Pierre Hugyhe’s work is Fukushima, Japan, desolate since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami; monkeys are depicted as the last living creatures on earth, continually repeating the human act of unconsciously remembering. In line with the exhibition’s focus on the future, several works are infused with sci-fi elements. British artist Ursula Mayer dismantles the gender binary, the visual strategies of commercialism and the classical language of film and develops the idea of the post-human. The participatory work by American artist Christine Sun Kim tells a fictional story about the future, incorporating the noises created by a device of her own design.

To more closely reflect diverse local characteristics and more actively encourage interaction with the public, Mediacity Seoul 2016 will be held at all branches of the Seoul Museum of Art, including the Seosomun Main Branch, Buk Seoul Museum of Art in Nowon-gu, Nam Seoul Living Arts Museum in Gwanak-gu, Nanji Residency in Mapo-gu. In consideration of the limitations of a one-time biennale, and in an effort to move beyond them, Mediacity Seoul will also publish issues of the non-periodical publication COULD BE before and after this year’s events. Two summer camp programs, directed Yang Ah Ham and Taeyoon Choi, have also been organized for the general public.

Three of Korea’s biggest annual contemporary art events are set to open this September: the Gwangju Biennale (Sep 2–Nov 6), the Busan Biennale (Sep 3–Nov 30), and Mediacity Seoul (Sep 1–Nov 20). Just in time for the 2016 biennale season, when the eyes of the international art word are turned on Korea, TheArtro has prepared an abundance of related content. In ‘2016 Korean Biennales at a Glance,’ the first such offering, we provide details on exhibition themes, participating artists, and other information that will be useful for visitors to the biennales. In the first week of September, TheArtro will make available the diverse content created by the Korea Arts Management Service in partnership with Art Asia Pacific for a special biennale edition of the Hong Kong–based art publication. Other articles will feature Korean artists who have participated in international biennales, including in Korea.

The theme of the eleventh Gwangju Biennale, led by Artistic Director Maria Lind (Director, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm), is “The Eighth Climate (What does art do?).” The notion of the eighth climate can be traced to the twelfth-century mystic and philosopher Sohravardi and refers to an “imaginal” world, existing beyond the seven climates into which astronomers once divided the earth and accessible through the imaginative faculties. The Gwangju Biennale seeks to make full use of the “imaginative capacity” of art to look ahead to the future and reflect on art’s fundamental role.

In line with this theme, artworks looking at a broad range of political and social issues, including history, memory, feminism, and the post-Internet era will be featured at the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall and other venues throughout the city. The different sections in the Exhibition Hall will have varying arrangements and numbers of works in order to create different moods. Among the featured works will be German artist Hito Steyerl’s installation ‘Factory of the Sun’ and Spanish artist Dora Garcia’s ‘Nokdu Bookstore for the Living and the Dead,’ which reproduces the bookshop that acted as a focal point of the May 18 Democracy Movement, as well as pieces by Lebanese media artist Walid Raad and French video artist Philippe Parreno.

A unique aspect of the eleventh Gwangju Biennale was the process-oriented planning and the curators’ efforts to collaborate with the local arts sector. A year in advance, Artistic Director Maria Lind began forming her diverse team of curators, and the team worked together to plan the exhibition. Researchers and participating artists worked together on site, got involved in collaborative regional projects, and also participated in educational programs at colleges and alternative schools. As an extension of ongoing reflections on art’s place in society, various channels will be opened for examination of this question, including monthly gatherings, Infra-School (Gwangju Biennale’s lecture and seminar series), and the eleventh Gwangju Biennale Forum.

This year’s Busan Biennale promises to be the biggest yet. In addition to the Busan Museum of Art, the venue of previous years, this year’s biennale will also be held at F1963, a nearly 10,000-square meter exhibition space set up in what was formerly the KISWIRE Suyeong Factory. An exhibition and various other programs will be held in the new multipurpose cultural space, where the look of the old factory has mostly been preserved.

This year’s biennale features two exhibits, titled Project 1 and Project 2; academic programs and seminars related to the exhibition theme, as well as a networking party and other events, which together constitute Project 3. Project 1, which will be held at the Busan Museum of Art, is called “an/other avant-garde china-japan-korea.” A product of collaborative planning by the biennale’s Chinese, Japanese, and Korean curators, Project 1 is a collection of experimental art from the three countries. Topics covered include the period of unrest and conflict in China, spanning from the Cultural Revolution to the “Beijing Spring” and the Tiananmen Square protests; the avant-garde period in Japan from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the late 1980s, including parts of the Gutai, Mono-ha, and Superflat movements; and the domain of experimental art in Korea from the sixties to the eighties, including conceptual art, happenings, and media art. This will be the first large-scale exhibition to shed light on avant-garde art in Asia, which has been underemphasized within the Eurocentric field of art history.

The theme of this year’s Busan Biennale, “Hybridizing Earth, Discussing Multitude,” is also the title of the Project 2 exhibition, personally overseen by Artistic Director Yun Cheagab. Featuring the works of fifty-six artist teams and individual artists, from twenty-three countries, this exhibition focuses on the biennale system within an age of multiplicity, a time characterized by increasingly global communities and continuous technological advancement. Artistic Director Yun said “the three-project biennale would explore the nature of the connection—continuity, discontinuity, or mixture—between the spontaneously formed, locally based pre-nineties avant-garde system and the post-nineties global biennale system.”

The title of Mediacity Seoul 2016, “Neriri Kiruru Harara,” comes from the poem “Two Billion Light Years of Solitude” by Tanikawa Shuntaro, which imagines the language of Martians. An expression of languages that are yet to come, “Neriri Kiruru Harara” is the key to understanding this year’s exhibition. Looking at the question of how undesirable legacies, like war, disaster, and poverty, can be transmuted into anticipation about the future, Mediacity Seoul 2016 proposes varied possibilities for the future as relayed through the language of art and through media.

Compared to previous years, this year’s exhibition features a higher proportion of young artists and female artists, as well as artists from Africa and Latin America. The selected works are by major artists in the international contemporary art scene, who represent a wide range of generations and cultural areas, including Pierre Huyghe of France, Eduardo Navarro of Argentina, the late Chantal Akerman of Belgium, Ben Russell of the United States, Marguerite Humeau of the UK, Eduardo Navarro’s performance creates through the movements of the body and of various tools a psychological landscape that breaks free of the system of language. The backdrop of Pierre Hugyhe’s work is Fukushima, Japan, desolate since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami; monkeys are depicted as the last living creatures on earth, continually repeating the human act of unconsciously remembering. In line with the exhibition’s focus on the future, several works are infused with sci-fi elements. British artist Ursula Mayer dismantles the gender binary, the visual strategies of commercialism and the classical language of film and develops the idea of the post-human. The participatory work by American artist Christine Sun Kim tells a fictional story about the future, incorporating the noises created by a device of her own design.

To more closely reflect diverse local characteristics and more actively encourage interaction with the public, Mediacity Seoul 2016 will be held at all branches of the Seoul Museum of Art, including the Seosomun Main Branch, Buk Seoul Museum of Art in Nowon-gu, Nam Seoul Living Arts Museum in Gwanak-gu, Nanji Residency in Mapo-gu. In consideration of the limitations of a one-time biennale, and in an effort to move beyond them, Mediacity Seoul will also publish issues of the non-periodical publication COULD BE before and after this year’s events. Two summer camp programs, directed Yang Ah Ham and Taeyoon Choi, have also been organized for the general public.