The Busan and Gwangju Biennales in South Korea have, until recently, occurred alongside each other every two years. The former is the smaller and younger of the pair. Formerly known as the Pusan International Contemporary Art Festival, it debuted under its present moniker in 2002. The latter, now in its 15^th iteration, is Asia's oldest contemporary art biennale and regarded as one of the continent’s most illustrious (India was the first Asian country to adopt the format with a triennial in 1968). The Gwangju Biennale was interrupted by the global pandemic and an expedited schedule – the previous edition having taken place only last year has brought it back on track for its 30th anniversary in 2024, with the two exhibitions coinciding once again.

While curatorial frameworks are often intended to be sufficiently pliable to accommodate a plurality of voices, particularly in the case of a large-scale international biennale, nothing could be further from the idea of the freewheeling pirate utopia than the strictures of monastic existence.

The current Busan Biennale is helmed by Europe-based curators and academics Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte and includes the work of 62 artists and artists’ collectives. Titled Seeing in the Dark, its intellectual premises are inventively, if confusingly, multi-axial. The show is thematically poised between notions of “pirate utopias” and Buddhist monasticism. Pirate utopias, as theorised by the late anthropologist David Graeber, are anti-authoritarian entities, functioning outside of state and institutional power in self-determined ways. The trope of darkness, according to the curators, informs “both pirate enlightenment… as well as Buddhist enlightenment in finding a path towards the end of suffering”; pirate utopia and monastery alike are “spaces of ...liberation”. While curatorial frameworks are often intended to be sufficiently pliable to accommodate a plurality of voices, particularly in the case of a large-scale international biennale, nothing could be further from the idea of the freewheeling pirate utopia than the strictures of monastic existence. The desired liberation in Buddhist theology, it should be noted, is release from the karmic cycle, rather than autonomy from political and socio-cultural dominance.

That said, the creative team has put the unlikely dialogue to good use, bringing works together in astute, incongruous ways that prove visually and conjecturally surprising. At Busan’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), for instance, the Biennale’s main venue, viewers encounter Eugene Jung’s hulking, deconstructed pirate ship, W💀W (Waves of Wreckage) next to Song Cheon’s pair of massive paintings in a traditional Buddhist manner, Avalokiteshvara and Mary-The Truth Has Never Left My Side, both made in 2024. The boat-shaped mandorlas around the sainted figures, signifying wisdom, strike a salient contrast with Jung’s installation; here, rather than suggesting a space of liberation as its description states, the broken vessel seems to betoken the myriad ills to which flesh and human life are heir. Self-taught artist Doowon Lee’s disarmingly playful installation, The flower garden of BUDDHA-BEE in a caravan (2024), is a literal caravan adorned with painted images of the Buddha as a bee, sitting outdoors in a large, grassy patch; facing it from inside the building, Omar Chowdhury’s video installation, BAN♡ITS (2024), was shot in the lawless borderlands of eastern Bangladesh and relates a para-fictional narrative of bandits re-staging a heist. The setting of works in particular locales also evinces a tongue-in-cheek curatorial wit. The biennale incorporates several other venues, including the Busan Modern & Contemporary History Museum, which used to house the Bank of Korea’s local office. Located in the basement of the former bank building, street artist Koo Hunjoo’s series, Mugunghwa Pirates (2024), reimagines South Korean presidents as buccaneers, including Park Geun-hye, who was imprisoned for bribery – a picture of financial plunder situated in a space of capitalist accumulation.

The exhibition lapses into disappointing torpor when works fail the potential for compelling commentary, given the thematic context. Theanly Chov’s portraits of his fellow Cambodians (2019-23) are intended to evoke the quotidian struggles of their subjects, but, while perhaps sincerely meant, hardly does justice to the biennale’s conceptual complexity. Conversely, Sophia Al-Maria’s Bull and Bear (2023) exemplifies the shortcomings of abstract intellectualising when more immediate approaches are at hand. A pair of images of Richard Quest, CNN’s long-time business correspondent, accompanies a recording of him reciting T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men (1925) – drawing associations between an inexorable capitalist system and the “powerlessness” of human civilisation referred to in the poem. Big topics, however, are not always conducive for effective art-making; the uncomfortably private and unpalatably direct can frequently be more cogent. If the biennale aims to speak to “multicultural, spiritually tolerant, sexually free” guerilla ethics, then the personal utopia that Quest must have been searching for when he was arrested after hours in Manhattan’s Central Park with another man in 2008, in possession of objects that suggested unusual proclivities, would have made a more pertinent, if painful, account of the attempt to see in the dark of our times.

Unlike its Busan counterpart, the Gwangju Biennale has banked its hopes on a spectacular, almost pitch-perfect universality. In French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, famed for the notion of relational aesthetics and the creative brains behind another revered Asian institution, the Taipei Biennial, in 2014, Gwangju has found a suitably distinguished figure to mark its third decade in existence. Bourriaud’s biennale, christened PANSORI – A Soundscape of the 21st Century, is an expansive project that addresses the shared space between “humans, machines, animals, spirits and organic life”, a Promethean vision if nothing else. It encompasses, by its own reckoning, 72 artists from 30 countries (Pansori is a genre of musical storytelling that emerged in the 17^th century and has gained prominence in Korean pop culture thanks to the likes of the pop band Leenalchi). Using sound as a central metaphor, the exhibition is categorised into three sections that span the main biennale hall: Feedback Effect, Polyphonies and Primordial Sound.

It is perhaps the last segment that best reflects the curator’s capacious imagination. Primordial Sound is informed by the two “immensities” of the universe: the “vastness of the cosmos and the minuscules of the molecular world”. Installations channelling both the monumental and minute speak to the scalar dichotomies of our world; the juxtaposition of works, in particular, foregrounds this aspect. Dominique Knowles’ behemoth of an abstract painting, The Solemn and Dignified Burial Befitting My Beloved for All Seasons, measuring 30 meters across, provides the backdrop to Bianca Bondi’s The Long Dark Swim, an interactive landscape with salt dunes, plants, pools of liquid and strange objects and bodies (both 2024). Moving between the two, the viewer is required to adjust from the optical inundation of the painting to the multi-sensorial modalities of the installation. Elsewhere, in the Feedback Effect section, sound becomes analogised as space, “a knot that connects all emancipation struggles, from feminism to decolonisation or LGBT+ rights”– from Choi Haneyl’s Crying Uncle’s Room (2024), where the hybrid materialities of his sculptures become surrogates for ageing and alienated queer bodies, to Amol K. Patil’s Who is Invited in the City? (2024), a theatrical installation of sound, light, drawings and bronze sculpture that addresses the marginalisation of the Dalit community in Mumbai.

The biennale also features 31 independently organised pavilions, with many tied to cities, countries or regions; several were put together by institutions or art spaces. Southeast Asia is especially well-represented this year with seven country pavilions and one by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The most remarkable of the group is the Vietnamese pavilion. A presentation of the work of Pham Minh Hieu, comprised of little more than a two-sided, lenticular folding screen and a sound piece, is a testament that contemporary art from the region need not be oriented around essentialist tropes of the tropical or exotic. The Myanmar Pavilion, on the other hand, titled Heritage of the Golden Land: A Mother’s Embrace, is a missed opportunity. Organised by the privately owned K&L Museum in Gwacheon, it includes the work of six artists, all male – and the Myanmar Photo Archive. Several female Burmese artists took to social media to bemoan the lack of gender diversity in the exhibition. At a time when civil war is ongoing – the military junta stands accused of atrocities against its citizens and many, including artists, are attempting to flee Myanmar to escape recently mandated conscription – it surely seems misguided to liken the country to “a nurturing mother figure”. Htein Lin’s massive paintings, for instance, are some of the most striking works in the pavilion, depicting internally displaced refugees arriving in the artist’s home of Kalaw, in southern Shan state, on foot and on motorcycles. What the exhibition fails to mention is that he was imprisoned by the government in 2022, along with his wife, former U.K. ambassador Vicky Bowman – a baffling omission.

Between the catholic broadness of Bourriaud’s vision and the heterogeneity represented by the numerous pavilions, the present edition of the Gwangju Biennale seems unimpeachable in its attempt at an all-embracing inclusivity. Yet, the seamless polish of the main exhibition left one wondering if a surfeit of sophistication might not necessarily be a checked box. A genuinely felt vein of emotion, of sentiment, seemed to be missing from the proceedings, drowned out by canny visual vernaculars, shrewdly chosen subject matter and unvarying deference to a certain ideal of the big blockbuster biennale.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.)