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 ¡ª with U.S. consent ¡ª 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.
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