Gwangju Biennale opens 5 September with 43 participants

The 16th Gwangju Biennale opens on 5 September 2026 and closes on 15 November, centred on the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall at 111 Biennale-ro, Buk-gu. Its title, You Must Change Your Life, is the closing line of a 1908 poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. The artistic director is the Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, working with curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee and Brian Kuan Wood, alongside assistant curators Lee Yein and Koyuri Sato. The participant list, announced on 9 June 2026, names 43 artists and groups.

Forty-three is a deliberately small number by current biennial standards, and the framing is equally specific: change treated not as an outcome but as a repeated practice that reorganises bodies and perception. Gwangju has run since 1995 and its founding is bound to the memory of the 1980 uprising, which makes an imperative sentence an unusually loaded choice of title here. For anyone planning one Asian trip this autumn, the dates also overlap with Bangkok's late-October opening.