This is the story of how a trip to the 14th Gwangju Biennale in May 2023 led me to throw 10 paintings out of my second story window like Rapunzel’s hair.
When I was doing my MFA, I led a graduate seminar on the art biennale phenomenon, and have been slowly making my way to as many of them as possible ever since. A last minute opportunity to visit Korea gave me the chance to see this year’s iteration of the Gwangju Biennale, titled “Soft and weak like water.”
Gwangju is in southwestern South Korea, about a 2-hour train ride south of Seoul. It is considered the cradle of Korean democracy due to the 5.18 Gwangju Uprising, a pro-democracy popular uprising in May 1980 that was brutally suppressed by the military regime with the loss of up to 2,000 lives. After democracy was restored in 1987, the biennale was founded in 1995 to commemorate the spirit of the uprising and celebrate the city’s cultural heritage.
This year’s artistic director, Sook-Kyung Lee, senior curator of international art at Tate Modern (and soon-to-be director of the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester), is the event’s first Korean artistic director since Kim Hong-hee in 2006.
The title “Soft and weak like water” comes from the Tao Te Ching, and according to Lee, “is about the paradoxical power of seemingly weak things, referring to the transformative nature of water that could break hard things like rocks or change the course of a river over a long period of time.”
Beyond the exhibition in main biennale hall, smaller exhibitions and country pavilions were housed in a multiple venues across town. My favorite was the Horanggasy Art Polygon, a glass pavilion located on the edge of a forest on Yangnim mountain. Walking up the winding alleys of the Yangnim-dong neighborhood felt like wandering around on the nostalgic streets of a Hayao Miyazaki film, with its mix of traditional Korean architecture and turn-of-the-century Western-style houses, now full of small galleries and tea rooms.
Inside the glass pavilion, I encountered for the first time in-person the work of Argentine-Swiss artist Vivian Suter. Suter is the subject of Rosalind Nashashibi’s 2017 short film Vivian’s Garden (one of two films that earned Nashashibi a Turner Prize nomination in 2017). The film is set in the jungle near Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, where Suter has lived and worked for four decades. A flood in her studio in 2005 caked all of her work in mud, and after recovering from the initial shock, Suter discovered that rather than destroying her paintings, nature had simply become part of them, and her practice subsequently incorporated the mud and rain and plants and insects and dog paw prints that are part of her lived environment directly into the paintings.
What was most prominent when entering the pavilion was the smell of the paintings. This I did not expect. The enclosed space did not smell mildly of oil paint and gesso and canvas. Instead, you could breathe in the earth and rain that had seeped into the vast concentration of hanging cloth paintings. I had never experienced paintings as an olfactory sensation before.
What I had done was experience music as painting. Specifically, the 1,027 opera broadcasts I listened to during Covid lockdown were distilled into the 18 paintings of the series I called “Synaesthesia” (2022). Synesthesia is perceiving something in one of the senses and simultaneously feeling it in another.
Kandinsky famously dropped out of law school to study painting after attending a performance of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, where, he later said, “I saw all my colors in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.”
Each of my paintings are a visual profile of the music of an opera character. In some cases, I painted specific interpreters of those roles. The paintings are acrylic on unstretched canvas, 3 to 4 feet high and about 4½ feet wide. When I got home from Korea, I decided to hang all of them up in my apartment, like in the Suter exhibition. But instead of attaching them to beams in the ceiling or to track lighting (I don’t have either), I attached them to each other, and ultimately hung them off the balconies around my split-level apartment complex. In homage to Kandinsky, I picked out the 10 Wagner opera characters to display.
And that is how this installation came about.
From top to bottom:
- Patricia Chow, Tristan (Ben Heppner), Kundry, Isolde, Brünnhilde
- Patricia Chow, Erda, Fricka, Rhinemaidens
- Patricia Chow, Tannhäuser, Senta, Ortrud (Leonie Rysanek)
Firstindigo&Lifestyle 