Public Programs @ The Institute
Series: The Institutum Series on Southeast Asia
P for Practice - Some notes on the 16th Gwangju Biennale
Tuesday, March 31, 2026, 6:00pm
Lecture by Ho Tzu Nyen, Artist and Curator of the Gwangju Biennale
The title of the 16th edition of the Gwangju Biennale, You Must Change Your Life, is inspired by the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo. In Rilke’s 1908 poem, an imagined, fragmentary ancient sculpture releases within its viewer an overwhelming surge of emotional energy that compels new commitments and life-changing resolutions. The intensity of this encounter culminates in the line: You must change your life. Yet rather than specifying how one must change, the poem leaves transformation open in its possibility. Taking inspiration from this imperative, the Biennale explores change as an artistic method through which artists experiment with new forms of life, power, and relation.
Yet, change unfolds not only in dramatic large-scale events and spectacular historical ruptures, but also quietly and continuously in our everyday lives. A central proposition of this Biennale is that change is sustained through experimentation and practice over time. The repetition of our practices shapes our worldview and determines how we live. A starting point of this exhibition is to look at artistic practices as living models of creative resilience and cumulative techniques for engaging with change as an embodied experience.
The 16th Gwangju Biennale adopts a deliberately concentrated format, featuring the smallest number of artists in its history. It privileges intensity over accumulation and deepens engagement by presenting multiple works that traverse many of the participating artists' life trajectories. What emerges is not a survey of isolated gestures, but a sense of persistence over time through which the contours of artistic practice become visible. In this lecture, Ho Tzu Nyen will introduce some of the starting propositions and experiments behind the coming edition of the Gwangju Biennale, in dialogue with his ongoing project P for Power. Both explore how power and transformation emerge through practices repeated over time, across bodies, histories, and systems. Moving between these trajectories, the lecture sketches the 16th Gwangju Biennale—an attempt to think through exhibition-making as a way of engaging with artistic practice itself.
Steeped in numerous Eastern and Western cultural references ranging from art history to theatre and from cinema to music to philosophy, Ho Tzu Nyen’s works blend mythical narratives and historical facts to mobilise different understandings of history, its writing and its transmission. The central theme of his œuvre is a long-term investigation of the plurality of cultural identities in Southeast Asia, a region so multifaceted in terms of its languages, religions, cultures and influences that it is impossible to reduce it to a simple geographical area or some fundamental historical base. This observation as to the history of this region of the world is reflected in his pieces which weave together different regimes of knowledge, narratives and representations. From documentary research to fantasy, his work combines archival images, animation and film in installations that are often immersive and theatrical.
Ho Tzu Nyen is the Artistic Director of the 2026 Gwangju Biennale. One-person exhibitions of his work have been held at Hamburger Kunsthalle (2025), LUMA Arles (2025), Mudam Museum of Modern Art (2025), Hessel Museum of Art (2024), Art Sonje Center (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2024), Singapore Art Museum (2023), Hammer Museum (2022), Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (2021), Crow Museum of Asian Arts (2021), Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] (2021), Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art (Oldenburg, 2019), Kunstverein in Hamburg (2018), Ming Contemporary Art Museum [McaM] (Shanghai, 2018), Asia Art Archive (2017), Guggenheim Bilbao (2015), Mori Art Museum, (2012), The Substation (Singapore, 2003). He represented the Singapore Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).
Ho Tzu Nyen has been appointed Artistic Director of the 2026 Gwangju Biennale.
This event is a part of The Institutum Series on Southeast Asia.
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