Brazilian artists find new inspiration in Seoul ahead of Gwangju Biennale

Brazilian artists work on their new works for the 16th Gwangju Biennale at an open studio at the Brazilian Embassy in Seoul, Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk

By Lee Hae-rin

• Published Aug 13, 2026 2:15 PM KST

Brazilian Embassy opens its space to artists preparing for national pavilion

Brazilian choreographer and performer Maruan Sipert has been roaming Seoul for days, observing street cleaners, traffic, weathered walls and construction sites.

For the Lisbon-based artist, these are not simply scenes from his first trip to Korea. They are choreography. The dancer brings these encounters back to the Brazilian Embassy where he is currently working to shape a new performance and installation for the 16th Gwangju Biennale, scheduled to open on Sept. 5.

While Brazilian artists have been invited to the exhibit before, this year marks a milestone: Brazil will have its own national pavilion for the first time.

“My interest is the discourse of the cities,” he said as to the source of his artistic inspiration.

Seoul’s scale, relentless pace and workplace pressures have become central to his reading of the city, he said, where people seem perpetually in motion and urban life can feel both rhythmic and constraining.

Sipert is one of nine Brazilian artists taking part in the pavilion.

The Brazilian Embassy in Seoul has offered them space to prepare their works, opening the studio to the public through Aug. 21 on weekdays. Visitors can watch the works take shape and speak directly with the artists about their research.

The resulting works, alongside pieces transported from Brazil and the United States, will be shown at the biennale.

The embassy calls the initiative "Tropism," a biological term describing growth directed by external stimuli such as light, gravity and touch. In its curatorial context, “Tropism” refers to artistic practices shaped by a new environment — Seoul.

“It was an idea that was developed together by the embassy and the curators,” an embassy official said. The initial proposal was to bring one artist to Seoul to work before the biennale. But when curator Aldones Nino asked whether an embassy space might be available, the officials realized Brazil Hall could accommodate more artists.

“That was the beginning of the idea of this curatorship,” he said.

Outside the studio, the artists have been immersing themselves in Seoul — walking its streets relentlessly, hiking nearby mountain trails, working out with seniors at outdoor exercise parks, wandering through neighborhood markets and sourcing materials from local art shops, construction sites and city streets — while describing Korean people as kind, warm and welcoming of their presence.

Sipert is gathering materials and observations from Seoul for an installation and performance rooted in what he calls “social choreography.” He hopes the work will send audiences back into the city with a sharper awareness of everyday gestures.

Painter Vinicius Gerheim, raised in Minas Gerais, a southeastern province in Brazil known for Catholic domestic interiors, textiles and handmade objects, has found echoes of his own visual language in Korea’s ornaments, bright colors and detailed craftsmanship. His work, “Moinho,” or “Mill,” links the physical grinding of pigment to painting’s ability to absorb and transform images.

“Painting is also a way to change matter,” Gerheim said. “To take a reference and digest it and transform it into another language.”

Interdisciplinary artist Isabella Ogeda has taken another route into Seoul. Her work connects painting, video, performance and scientific research, and she recently visited the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research facility in Daejeon’s Korean Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) to develop new work on fusion energy.

Calling KFE officials her “artistic collaborator,” Ogeda said being welcomed as the first outsider and artist into the reactor’s highly specialized environment became central to her new work: “I’m interested in creating bridges across institutions, ways of thinking, ways of devising the world.”

The program also includes visual artists Heloisa Hariadne, Lucas Lugarinho, Manauara Clandestina and Seoul-based Patricia Abbott, as well as residency director and photographer Vicente de Mello. Nino and co-curator Bruna Levy are leading the project, whose broader exhibition is titled “Things That Devour Tomorrow: Brazil in Germination.”

Hariadne, who said Seoul’s sense of order has given her “a peace to create,” is working across paintings and ceramics to explore body, memory, nature and ancestry. Lugarinho is developing a site-responsive, three-dimensional cityscape with materials associated with protective gear, while Abbott works across painting, photography, printmaking and artificial intelligence, exploring friction between digital acceleration and slow, analogue image making processes with “hanji,” Korean traditional paper.

For visitor Yun Ji-hee, 64, the open studio offered a different entry point into contemporary Brazilian art.

“Seoul as interpreted by Brazilian artists felt both new and familiar,” she said, explaining the artists’ fresh perspectives helped her understand Brazil as a country with “rich diversity.”

“It felt as though these artists were diplomats,” she said. “They are not simply expressing their own ideas one-sidedly, but also taking in ours and communicating with us. I think that is real cultural exchange.”