Up to the sixth Gwangju Design Biennale held in 2015, a decade passed since its debut in 2005 with the 7th scheduled to arrive in 2017. As the first comprehensive design biennale in Asia, the Gwangju Design Biennale has presented a wide range of desig...
Up to the sixth Gwangju Design Biennale held in 2015, a decade passed since its debut in 2005 with the 7th scheduled to arrive in 2017. As the first comprehensive design biennale in Asia, the Gwangju Design Biennale has presented a wide range of design-related exhibitions and served as an avant courier for other newly emerging design exhibitions or biennales. Still, given not a few challenges and critical concerns have arisen over its operation for the past decade, it is necessary to shed new light on the Gwangju Design Biennale by analyzing it across the board.
Against the backdrop of the foregoing, the present paper explores the characteristics of the Gwangju Design Biennale with a 10-year history by analyzing its art works, artists and curators.
The present analysis is limited to the catalogues published until now, on the grounds that they convey the intents of planning, art works and artists from objective perspectives and effectively function as another media for exhibitions. Thus, the Gwangju Design Biennale is analyzed here within a finite analysis framework via catalogues.
Among other components of the Gwangju Design Biennale, art works, artists and curators are analyzed in that those three are the fundamental and minimal components constituting its exhibitions. The art works displayed at main exhibitions are analyzed in light of their design categories and how such categories are manifested per exhibition. The artists are categorized based on their nationalities and types of participants, e.g. individuals, enterprises, organizations, studios, etc. The nationalities or the countries of origin are sorted out relative to the different types of participants. In reference to the categories, the trends in the types of participant artists over the six biennials are identified. As for curators, first, the composition of curators per biennial is analyzed, while their nationalities and schools are examined to explore the factors influencing each of them.
The present analysis framework involving the artists, art works and curators highlights four characteristics of the Gwangju Design Biennale.
First, the Gwangju Design Biennale has focused on designer artists. Despite its artist-oriented policy, the Gwangju Design Biennale seems to have focused on a few high-profile designers, which is attributable to the confined structure of the country’s design industry. Second, exhibitions are oriented towards things in the name of art works. Unlike previous design exhibitions, and despite its motto advocating a comprehensive design exhibition, the Gwangju Design Biennale has lately exposed a bias towards product design. Third, the Gwangju Design Biennale remains lopsided towards a few countries, or a small number of Asian and Western countries advanced in design, e.g. Korea, China, Japan, the US, the UK and Italy. Fourth, the convergence of traditionality and modernity characterizes the Gwangju Design Biennale. In particular, Asian design exhibits are comprised of traditional and modern products carrying Asian value. Given biennial exhibitions vary with directors every two years, the present analysis framework highlights the foregoing characteristics of the exhibitions of the Gwangju Design Biennale.
This paper is worth noting in that it analyzes the characteristics of the six wangju Design Biennales up to 2015. The present findings will serve as the reference data for further studies on improvement measures for addressing relevant challenges. Hopefully, the present study may lay the foundation for diversified analyses and discourses on the Gwangju Design Biennale.