Hearing talk of the “spirit” of somewhere can come with a leadened feeling. It usually means the place has been traumatized, often by the people in power.
One such place is Gwangju, South Korea, a city of 1.5 million that gathers art enthusiasts from around the world once every two years. The Gwangju Biennale, currently showing through Dec. 1, is the longest-running contemporary art festival in East Asia, likened in importance to Germany’s documenta, but with a non-Eurocentric focus. It launched in 1995 in commemoration of the Gwangju uprising on May 18, 1980, when the military government — with U.S. consent — massacred pro-democracy protesters there. Since then, the spirit of Gwangju has stood for resistance, solidarity and freedom: fertile ground for a cultural festival, but not without inherent complexities.
The uprising was crucial to South Korea’s democratization and has been portrayed in a number of fictional works in the past decade. The 2014 novel “Human Acts” by bestselling author Han Kang, who contributed text to the opening performance of this year’s biennale, imagines the lives and afterlives of the bloody crackdown’s survivors and victims. The 2017 film “A Taxi Driver” dramatizes the true story of a Korean cabbie who shuttles a German journalist through Gwangju during the rebellion, using a taxi as an ambulance, defense barricade and getaway car along the way.