Field Trip: Gwangju

With six co-artistic directors from across Asia and six sub-themes, the 2012 Gwangju Biennale, “Roundtable,” was, by design, “not about unanimity”—and by that measure, the biennale was a huge success. Instead, the 2012 edition was, in the curators’ words, “an open-ended series of collaborations that require active participation and individual responsibility, resulting in a multiplicity of voice, as well as opportunities for cross-contamination.” While it was a rhetorically overloaded biennale, with so many themes and concepts floating in the air that, in the end, it seemed to be about nothing in particular, there was still plenty of art to see. More than 90 artists were drafted onto color-coded teams aligned with each of the curators—Nancy Adajania, Wassan al-Khudhairi, Mami Kataoka, Sunjung Kim, Carol Yinghua Lu and Alia Swastika—and spread over the five spaces of Biennale Hall, as well as dispersed to a few token off-site locations around the city.