This autumn, biennales of different character will take place, or are about to open, across six regions of Korea—Gwangju, Busan, Jeju, Gyeonggi, Changwon, and Gongju. The fact that so many international art events are being held across the country within a single season speaks to the scale and expanding reach of Korea’s art ecosystem.
 
Yet when one visits the official websites of these institutions, another scene emerges behind the spectacle of their opening ceremonies. Click on the “Past Exhibitions” menu and the visitor is met with something like an empty room. The basic framework remains—the exhibition title, dates, and list of participating artists—but the records that would give substance to that framework—the places where the works were installed, what they attempted to articulate, the curatorial logic behind the exhibition, and the critical responses it generated—are rarely connected in any meaningful way.
 
The buildings remain, but the rooms inside them are empty. Korea’s biennales are, at present, building houses like these.
 
A biennale is a cultural institution in which artists, curators, and local communities come together over a defined period to produce new works and discourses. The artists invited, the works commissioned, and the themes adopted are important historical evidence of what the art world of a particular period was sensing, questioning, and attempting to understand.
 
The fact that an exhibition has closed does not diminish its value as historical evidence. A biennale moves beyond the status of a one-time spectacle and becomes an intellectual institution only when, after its closure, the exhibition continues to be studied, debated, and carried forward into the work of subsequent generations. The key mechanism that makes this possible is the archive.
 
 
 
What Is an Archive?
 
An archive is not a warehouse in which materials are simply accumulated. It is a structure that preserves and reconnects the relationships between them.
 
Consider a single work of art. Its title and artist’s name are not enough to fully understand it. When was it made? What materials does it comprise? Where was it positioned within the exhibition space? How was that position connected to the logic of the curatorial project? How was the work interpreted by critics at the time? Only when these different layers intersect does the work become an object of research and interpretation.
 
Without those connections, photographs remain photographs, catalogues remain catalogues, and artist biographies remain artist biographies. The materials survive, but the relationships between them disappear. What remains is not a complete archive, but something closer to the fragments of one.
 
It is a mistake to believe that such deficiencies can be concealed by the sophistication of a website. A polished layout and a functioning search engine are of little use if the site lacks substantive content and a meaningful structure of connections. A page may imitate the appearance of an archive, but without content and context it is less a public record than a promotional instrument borrowing the language of documentation.
 
 
 
Gaps in the Record
 
Once an exhibition ends, the works are dismantled and the spaces return to their previous state. The sensory event that unfolded during the exhibition begins to disperse. What remains is the record.
 
Without installation photographs and exhibition plans, it becomes difficult to reconstruct the relationship between the works and the spaces that contained them. Without detailed information about the works, there is no reliable way to determine what the artists were attempting to do. Without curatorial statements and criticism, the exhibition’s questions and contemporary reception can no longer be properly examined or compared.
 
As these three layers of loss accumulate, an exhibition survives only through a few lines of institutional press material and the fading memories of those who experienced it. Works that might deserve reassessment are denied that possibility, while unsuccessful curatorial projects lose the chance to become resources for future editions.
 
 
 
The Uncomfortable Paradox of the Gwangju and Busan Biennales
 
Founded in 1995, the Gwangju Biennale has continued for more than three decades. The Busan Biennale traces its origins to the Busan Youth Biennale, established in 1981, and has accumulated more than four decades of history. After such a substantial period of activity, both should have become some of the thickest historical strata documenting the transformation and international expansion of Korean contemporary art.
 
The Gwangju Biennale has already demonstrated the possibility of such an archive. In 2024, marking its thirtieth anniversary, it presented the special archival exhibition 《Madang—Where We Become Us》 in Venice, making public posters, tickets, leaflets, VHS tapes, exhibition plans, and other materials. The exhibition demonstrated that the Gwangju Biennale could reconstruct its past records not merely as stored documents, but as historical assets.
 
At the same time, the exhibition left an important task unresolved. The density of documentation and level of scholarly accessibility achieved through a special exhibition must not remain a one-time event. They need to develop into a digital archive that can be accessed continuously.
 
If institutions with histories as long as those of the Gwangju and Busan Biennales have yet to establish a system for consistently connecting and making their past exhibitions and materials accessible, the situation of younger biennales is unlikely to be fundamentally different. The issue is not simply whether materials exist. It is also where they are located, how they are organised, and who can access them—and by what means.
 
 
 
Questions Institutions Must Ask Themselves
 
What do we possess? Where are those materials now? Which of them are publicly accessible, and what procedures are required to consult those that are not? Are the scattered fragments connected to one another?
 
If an institution cannot answer these questions, then even an extensive body of material lying within its walls is effectively nonexistent for outside researchers. Possessing documents and transforming them into public knowledge are entirely different responsibilities.
 
This requires institutions to determine, from the planning stage of an exhibition, what must be preserved as part of its record. Once the exhibition ends, materials must be reviewed, sources verified, and documentation made publicly available. Even when a website is redesigned, the addresses and relational structure of existing materials must remain intact.
 
This work also requires a dedicated team and stable funding. A one-time project to organise historical materials must be distinguished from the ongoing responsibility of managing records generated by new exhibitions.
 
The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, established the Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts, known as ASAC, in 1928. ASAC has spent decades collecting and cataloguing books, photographs, films, posters, documents, and press materials. Today, its ASAC database brings together information on the Biennale’s events and its archival collections within a single system.
 
What Korean biennales should learn from ASAC is not the scale of its facilities or the size of its holdings. It is the attitude that transformed record-keeping from a temporary project into a permanent way of being for the institution.
 
 
 
Conclusion: The True Value of Digital Archives
 
The next step for Korean biennales does not lie simply in staging more events. It lies in preserving exhibitions that have already taken place, as well as those currently underway or about to open, as subjects for future research and criticism.
 
When artists and works, exhibitions and spaces, curatorial frameworks and criticism, records and research are connected, the achievements of a biennale move beyond the success of a single edition. They become historical evidence of the aesthetic transformations and art-historical development of Korean contemporary art.
 
A digital archive is a public knowledge infrastructure that allows us to determine and verify the aesthetic significance of particular works and exhibitions, as well as the position they occupy within the history of Korean contemporary art.
 
The value of a biennale, therefore, cannot be judged solely by the number of editions it has held or the scale of its events. It will be demonstrated by how faithfully it documents the aesthetic and art-historical value of the art and knowledge it produces, and how successfully it transmits them to the future. The records that remain on its website—and those that have disappeared—already reveal both the possibilities and the limitations of that task.
 
 
 
References

- The 16th Gwangju Biennale, 《You Must Change Your Life》, September 5–November 15, 2026 
- Busan Biennale 2026, 《Dissident Chorus》, August 29–November 1, 2026 
- The 5th Jeju Biennale, 《Heokkeugok Modakchigok Iyahong: The Art of Transformation》, August 25–November 15, 2026  
- Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennale 2026, 《The Earth Makes》, September 18–November 1, 2026 
- Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2026, 《Resonance Field》, September 30–November 15, 2026 
- Geumgang Nature Art Biennale 2026, Gongju, September 12–November 8, 2026 
- Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts, ASAC, La Biennale di Venezia 
- 《Madang—Where We Become Us》, the Gwangju Biennale 30th-anniversary archival exhibition, April 18–November 24, 2024, Venice 

Jay Jongho Kim graduated from the Department of Art Theory at Hongik University and earned his master's degree in Art Planning from the same university. From 1996 to 2006, he worked as a curator at Gallery Seomi, planning director at CAIS Gallery, head of the curatorial research team at Art Center Nabi, director at Gallery Hyundai, and curator at Gana New York.

From 2008 to 2017, he served as the executive director of Doosan Gallery Seoul & New York and Doosan Residency New York, introducing Korean contemporary artists to the local scene in New York. After returning to Korea in 2017, he worked as an art consultant, conducting art education, collection consulting, and various art projects.

In 2021, he founded A Project Company and is currently running the platforms K-ARTNOW.COM and K-ARTIST.COM, which aim to promote Korean contemporary art on the global stage.