Gwangju Biennale Announces Theme for 16th Edition: You must change your life
Graphic by E Roon Kang with KAIST Visual Instruments Lab, featuring poetry generated by AI based on an image of a Jeju Volcanic Rock from Jeju Stone Park. Courtesy Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Gwangju Biennale Announces Theme for 16th Edition: You must change your life
September 5 – November 15, 2026
Gwangju Biennale, South Korea
Artistic Director: Ho Tzu Nyen
www.gwangjubiennale.org
The Gwangju Biennale has announced the title and curatorial framework for its upcoming 16th edition “You must change your life” taking place from September 5 to November 15, 2026 at the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall.
Widely recognised as one of the most historically and politically grounded biennials in Asia, the Gwangju Biennale continues to engage deeply with the relationship between contemporary artistic practice and the conditions shaping our present. The 2026 edition builds on this legacy by foregrounding the transformative potential of art in a time marked by overlapping global crises and shifting social realities.
The Biennale takes its title from the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo (1908), in which an encounter with a fragmentary sculpture produces an overwhelming emotional intensity culminating in the imperative: “You must change your life.” Rather than prescribing a specific direction, the phrase opens transformation as a field of possibility, an approach that informs the curatorial thinking of this edition.
Led by Artistic Director Ho Tzu Nyen, together with curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee, and Brian Kuan Wood, the exhibition explores change not as a singular event, but as an ongoing process that unfolds across different temporalities, from moments of rupture to the quieter, continuous transformations embedded in everyday life.
“We imagine this exhibition moving viewers across different scales and speeds of change,” said Artistic Director Ho Tzu Nyen. “Few cities embody the ideals and the experience of change more powerfully than Gwangju, whose history of democratic struggle continues to resonate globally. Here, change is not abstract—it is lived history.”
In this context, the Biennale proposes artistic practice itself as a site through which change can be experienced, rehearsed, and sustained. Through repetition, discipline, and experimentation, artistic processes are understood as living models of resilience, shaping how individuals and communities engage with the world over time. The exhibition brings together artists whose practices engage personal and collective histories as sites of transformation, material, spiritual, and political.
A defining feature of this edition is its deliberately concentrated format, presenting the smallest number of artists in the Biennale’s history. Rather than expanding outward, the exhibition privileges depth and duration, allowing for sustained engagement with multiple works across the trajectories of each participating artist. This approach shifts the focus from accumulation to intensity, proposing an alternative understanding of scale grounded in attention, persistence, and capacity.
In doing so, You must change your life reflects on how change operates across bodies, systems, and environments, asking how art, through sustained practice, can cultivate the capacity to redirect forces at work in the world.
Further details, including participating artists and public programming, will be announced in the coming months.
For more information, visit www.gwangjubiennale.org.
