Park Han-sol reports on Korea's financial regulators, along with fintech and insurance. She previously wrote about the art world, from biennales and exhibitions to fairs and auctions, with a focus on Seoul and the figures shaping the scene. Before joining The Korea Times, she spent a year at ABC News' Seoul bureau, contributing to coverage of major Asia-Pacific events.
You must change your life: 2026 Gwangju Biennale tightens focus
Ho Tzu Nyen, artistic director of the 16th edition of the Gwangju Biennale, speaks at a press conference in Seoul, Friday, to unveil the upcoming exhibition's theme. Courtesy of Gwangju Biennale Foundation
By Park Han-sol
Artistic director Ho Tzu Nyen aims leaner structure, bigger ambition
“You must change your life.”
That’s the final line that crowns “Archaic Torso of Apollo” by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
In the 1908 poem, the speaker gazes upon the shattered torso of the Greek god, now headless and limbless, yet strangely alive. From this broken remnant, the reader begins to imagine the statue as it once stood whole. What starts as contemplation then turns into something more unsettling: the sense that the ancient sculpture is not merely being observed, but observing in return, silently urging the viewer toward a reckoning.
That mounting intensity erupts in the poem’s unforgettable final command: You must change your life.
“However, rather than specifying and dictating how one should change, the poem leaves transformation open in its possibility. The viewer is compelled to change, but they must decide on their own paths of change,” said Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen during a press meeting Friday in Seoul.
That imperative to change — forceful yet open — has inspired Ho as he prepares to helm the forthcoming edition of the Gwangju Biennale as artistic director.
The biennale, titled after Rilke’s verse, sets out to explore the transformative power of art in responding to the urgent crises of our time.
“We imagine this exhibition as a vehicle that can move audiences across different scales of experience and speeds of change,” he said. “And we believe there’s no better place to ask this question than in Gwangju — the city of change, whose history of democratic struggle [in 1980] continues to resonate globally. Here, I strongly believe change is not abstract; it is lived history.”
Participating artists thus approach transformation as embodied sites of personal and collective struggles — material, spiritual and lived.
While many major biennales in recent years have focused on expanding their scale, Ho has chosen the opposite. This edition adopts what he calls “a deliberately concentrated format,” featuring just 45 artists and collectives, the smallest number in the event’s three-decade history.
Rather than presenting a single work from a vast roster of creatives, the show gathers multiple pieces by each participant, inviting viewers to follow the longer arcs of their practices.
A still from Park Chan-kyong's "MANSHIN: Ten Thousand Spirits" (2013) / Courtesy of the artist
Together with curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee and Brian Kuan Wood, Ho offered a glimpse of several biennale commissions at the press conference.
In their collaboration, media artists Kwon Byung-jun and Park Chan-kyong present “Bullim (Augmentation).” The work takes cues from the Korean shamanic practice of “soe-geolip,” in which metal pieces are gathered from a community to be melted and turned into musical instruments used to summon spirits.
For the biennale, metal utensils collected from residents across South Jeolla Province will be recast into a sound installation, creating a shared sonic presence shaped by the materials of everyday life.
Meanwhile, Nam Hwa-yeon turns to women’s transformation through faith, reflecting on the persecution of Catholicism in the late 18th-century Joseon Dynasty. The dynasty’s women sought to adopt bodily practices in ways that challenged the patriarchal philosophy of the dominant Confucianism.
The 16th edition of the Gwangju Biennale will run from Sept. 5 to Nov. 15.