By skyforbes 
By Tseng Che-Wei (Daniel)
(The original Chinese version of this article was published in Qilu Criticism.)
It is at this very moment that I realize these biennales, that once moved me had become little more than advocacy machines, endlessly recycling the same concerns, and I had grown indifferent. Surveying the 15th Gwangju Biennale, chief curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s exhaustive curatorial statement① — spanning “conflictual borders, anti-migration walls, confinement, social distance, segregation policies” to how “carbon dioxide and urban life, desertification and migration, deforestation and social struggles, destruction of animal ecosystems and vegetal invasions have become brutally interconnected” — epitomizes a troubling trend. In an age where Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) dominates discourse, curatorial coherence has become secondary to issue aggregation. The goal seems to be cramming in as many topics as possible to legitimize the exhibition. These sprawling statements feel safe, skirting anything potentially controversial. Yet beneath their packaging of allegedly urgent concerns, they reveal a strange new conservatism — one that wastes audiences’ attention. Art critic Martin Herbert captured this perfectly in his critique of the 17th Lyon Biennale, coining the term “compassion fatigue”: “here there’s nary a subset of society that it isn’t incumbent on us to understand, remember, sympathise with and support.”②
As someone who has long worked in arts and culture, I’ve witnessed this phenomenon firsthand. The fragmented curatorial approach isn’t even the worst of it. What troubles me more is how this closed mode of issue presentation reduces viewers — who should be active participants — to passive observers, robbing us of genuine engagement. Worse still, it creates an insidious illusion: the sense that by attending, we’ve somehow done our part. To borrow from Lacanian theory, this can sublimate into a form of “surplus enjoyment” during the viewing experience — a kind of self-cleansing pleasure. Yet when confronted with these issues in reality, we stand paralyzed, deer-in-the-headlights.
This afflicts cultural workers especially, those of us tasked with affective production who too often neglect what’s closest to home. Trapped in echo chambers of tired topics and closed loops of stale advocacy, we might ask: despite exhibitions’ comprehensive coverage, what remains conspicuously absent? While curators boldly address decolonization, non-Western perspectives, digital surveillance, new media, earth ethics, and multispecies coexistence, they rarely turn that critical gaze inward — toward the cultural industry’s own capital structures, labor exploitation, and commercial machinations. For those of us working in this field, these should be the most urgent, practical concerns.
This is precisely what makes the Polish Pavilion at leeleenam studio stand apart from Gwangju’s main exhibitions and national pavilions. The title Katastematic Pleasures references ancient Epicurean philosophy — the tranquility achieved when one releases unnecessary desires, anxieties, and distractions. This modest inquiry into “what is enough?” contrasts sharply with the biennale’s supersaturated rhetoric. And this contrast is deliberate. Curator Paweł Janicki’s approach carries a hint of institutional critique wrapped in humility, becoming a conscious curatorial strategy. As the statement reads: “The power [of art to reassert our sense of agency] is revealed when creative individuals make autonomous decisions, are not constrained by platforms — vehicles for the replication of content, views, and attitudes — and when their artworks are not ‘attention processing plants.’ […] The exhibition presented in the Polish Pavilion is an expression of such reasserted agency. They restore a certain balance and jolt us out of routine and apathy.” Janicki continues, noting that while the Gwangju Biennale represents a global art event, the Polish Pavilion “presupposes not some imaginary ‘global audience,’ but rather numerous recipients bringing their individual, local perspectives into the global art context.”③
The exhibition opens with remember(me) (Przemysław Jasielski, 2024), a large-scale mechanical kinetic work. Pump-driven black liquid flows through connected tubes, intermittently etching worker silhouettes onto transparent panels. While it appears to embrace the fashionable Techno-Art aesthetic, the piece actually inverts the biomimetic trope of machines simulating life. Instead, it critiques how factory workers are alienated into simulating machines with their lives. Here, life literally becomes part of the assembly line.
Beneath its dazzling futurist veneer, these images derive from a 1978 documentary about the Fabryka Samochodów Osobowych car parts factory.④⑤ This period of industrialization coincided with Eastern Europe’s post-WWII upheaval, when historical continuity and stability could only be mortgaged against visions of technological acceleration. Through this dual invocation of future and past, Jasielski subtly gestures toward the historical conditions underlying today’s knowledge workers — and the looming risks as the cultural industry confronts new forms of automation. This reflection clarifies why this sole explicitly social work fits the Polish Pavilion’s curatorial framework: it doesn’t address distant problems but dissects our shared existential condition.
Does AI Dream of Gender? (Madina Mahomedova, Fredrik de Bleser, 2022–2024) continues exploring human-machine boundaries. This interactive audiovisual installation uses image-to-image translation AI algorithms to read viewers’ faces and regenerate digital mirror images on screen. Beyond its nod to Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the title probes questions of gender identity. Influenced by Donna Haraway’s gender deconstruction in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” woke culture’s challenge to traditional gender norms has swept the globe, even as concerns about excessive political correctness intensify. Yet given the issue’s sensitivity, such discussions remain rare in art discourse. Here, the artists adopt a neutral, non-judgmental stance, inviting viewers to observe their gendered features reflected on screen — to feel their self-image’s inherent fluidity and the anxiety that emerges when the subject’s gender flattens. The work sidesteps the didactic posturing common in contemporary biennales. Rather than prescribing correct thinking, it lets people confront their own images and experience identity’s uncertainty, resisting the rush to label oneself.
Positioned alone in a corridor, 340.3 (Maciej Markowski, 2017) is a visually arresting sound installation. A pair of speakers hang spring-suspended in vacuum chambers. Without air to carry sound, viewers can only sense the music through the speakers’ trembling and the decibel meter’s swinging needle — hearing nothing. The title references sound’s average speed in air: 340.3 meters per second, or Mach one — precisely what’s absent here. The vibrations on the speaker grilles confirm these silent screams exist, visualizing what it means to turn a deaf ear. For me, this became a metaphor for the entire Gwangju Biennale experience: speakers vibrating urgently, yet somehow the sound that might truly move us has been evacuated.
Art is no longer for me (Alicja Klich, 2022–2024) makes the exhibition’s critique of “the art world” explicit. The video installation presents canvases, pillows, and textiles embroidered with the title phrase in various languages, centered on footage of the artist sewing while delivering a monologue. She recounts her art school years in a deeply personal voice, wrestling with whether to abandon this punishing career for a “normal job” that might satisfy her parents. She describes working as an exhibition assistant at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum, watching stone-faced visitors drift through the space day after day. This work — which reads as a formal farewell to the art world — captures a 22-year-old artist’s self-doubt and bewilderment in the face of institutional mechanisms,⑥ her journey toward self-reconciliation and inner peace. This honest self-examination proves more affecting than any grand social issue, precisely because it reflects our lived human condition with such unvarnished truth.
The final space houses Discharge (AmbientRoom #6) (IP Group, 2022–2024), a kinetic installation stripped of complex theorizing that offers pure immersive experience. Five stainless steel plates wired to electronic equipment “create a synesthetic immersive environment of discharge, a place where energy is released, a sound-visual landscape created from the excess of accumulated power.”⑦ Through the technology’s operating principles, the work addresses pressure’s accumulation, excess, and ultimate release — the state changes between metal tension and relaxation. For viewers, it provides a meditation space of pure sensation, embodying Katastematic Pleasures’ core question: in this society weary of spectacle, can we still shed unnecessary desires, anxieties, and distractions to return to subtle perception and find our own tranquility? Here, finally, is long-sought quiet — no complex issues to decode, no political stances to declare, just sensory presence. It recalls what first drew us to art: not because works conveyed correct ideas, but because they touched something soft within us.
Amid Gwangju’s dazzling spectacle, Katastematic Pleasures charts a distinctive path. It abandons grand, verbose statements and never tries to spotlight stale social issues. Instead, it places viewer experience first, ceding interpretive space and leaving room for active engagement. Through reflexive narratives, it even invites us to question the exhibition’s own legitimacy.
For someone like me who has worked long in arts and culture, the Polish Pavilion offers rare respite. It doesn’t demand I understand, remember, sympathize with, and support every social group. It asks me to look inward and gently acknowledge that sometimes feeling “art is no longer for me” isn’t shameful. Through its sincere, unflinching self-disclosure, it soothes the numbness and restless anxiety that come from too much art, too often. At a premier venue like the Gwangju Biennale, the Polish Pavilion’s distinctive curatorial logic serves as institutional critique of the cultural industry’s collective anxiety. More importantly, through its accessible, feeling-centered work, it proves that aesthetics can exert influence and meaning without referencing external issues at all.
① Gwangju Biennale Foundation. (n.d.). Main Exhibition. Gwangju Biennale. Retrieved January 7, 2025, from https://www.gwangjubiennale.org/en/exhibition/past/15.do?subPageCode=main_exhibition
② Herbert, M. (2024, December 2). 17th Lyon Biennale Review: What Now? ArtReview. Retrieved from https://artreview.com/17th-lyon-biennale-crossing-the-water-review-martin-herbert/
③ Gwangju Biennale Pavilion. (2024). 폴란드 Poland. Gwangju Biennale Pavilion. https://gwangjubiennalepavilion.org/2024/%ED%8F%B4%EB%9E%80%EB%93%9C-poland/
④ Worth noting: this factory is now owned by South Korea’s Daewoo Group (대우그룹).
⑤ TVP Dokument. (1978). Narodziny Poloneza: Reportaż. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DINFwLxWfsE
⑥ In an interview, Klich acknowledges the irony: Art is no longer for me became her most widely noticed work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLazxst1OjU
⑦ IP Group. (2022). DISCHARGE: Ambient room #6 [Immersive experience]. IP Group. https://identityproblemgroup.com/DISCHARGE