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Enid Tsui

Politics has had a habit of barging into art biennales of late, from the current Gwangju Biennale in South Korea to the Venice Biennale earlier this year.
However, at the Busan Biennale, political noise is not an unfortunate sideshow: it is the whole curatorial premise.
The curators, Bahraini-Singaporean artist Amal Khalaf and Brussels-based writer Evelyn Simons, have called their edition of South Korea’s oldest biennale, “Dissident Chorus”.
The biennale seeks to move away from “the ruins of speech” – a breakdown of trust and the divisiveness of conventional communication – echoing Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh’s title for this year’s Venice Biennale, “In Minor Keys”.
In Busan, the focus on sound is meant to be literal, as is the curators’ intention of bringing politics into the exhibition.
Collective acts of listening can create solidarity and political agency, they say, pointing to the 20th century’s history of aural activism – using sound to drive social change. In the 1990s, American electronic music duo Drexciya used music to create an empowering Afrofuturist myth. Their album art, designed by American artist Abdul Qadim Haqq, is displayed prominently in Space OneZ, a former port warehouse and one of the Busan Biennale’s three venues.

The House of Korean Protest Songs – an archive preserving the music behind modern social movements – occupies the lobby of the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (Moca Busan) during the exhibition.
Current members of Ultra-red, a sound art collective founded in 1994 by Aids activists in the US, are exhibiting in the former Busan Nam High School and holding workshops designed to generate ideas for political action and community organising.
In this vast complex – recently vacated and wonderfully desolate – I had Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” playing in my head (“We don’t need no education / We don’t need no thought control”) as I looked at Ultra-red’s upended desks and chairs; Filipino-Australian Bhenji Ra’s 31-screen educational videos on transferring knowledge from the transgender, indigenous and queer communities; and Mongolian artist Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar’s classroom makeover with horns, faux fur and knick-knacks from a flea market.


With some works, sound does draw you in, namely Heaven Baek’s score as part of her piece Grass-Grown Corps Over the Sea and the Mountains, and fellow South Korean Hyunsung Park’s pulsating intervention in the kitchen area.
One of the raisons d’être of biennales is to commission ambitious artworks, and Moca Busan’s more conventional galleries feature some exceptional pieces.
Joshua Serafin’s three-channel film Whispering Pleas of the Eternal Echoes, which sprang from the Filipino’s discovery of a Japanese great-great-grandfather and the questions that arose for Serafin’s family, is a profound visual poetry about the afterlife.
The multidisciplinary artist, who uses the pronouns they/them, performs for the first time with their mother in an intimate collaboration that is not the self-indulgent documentary-as-art mode this kind of biographical premise often adopts.


South Korean artist Sungsil Ryu’s Ten Thousand Dreams – 12 ghostly dummies in school uniform singing from a scissor lift – is made with the same acerbic humour as seen in her video works, and the sadness and anger about the heavy expectations placed on children is certainly something many visitors can sympathise with.
Chinese artist Shuang Li’s work, Alliance (Heart Loop), draws intriguing parallels between tornadoes and media storms, and Belgian artist Tom Hallet’s hand-drawn monumental scroll with 3D prints, XXX, blurs boundaries magnificently.
South Korean artist Dew Kim’s site-specific installation, The Stage – After God, moves across the venues in three acts. “Act 1: The Stage of Blood”, at Moca Busan, consists of an altar without a deity, where the historic martyrdom of the queer and nonconforming is revealed, and where pain and pleasure are inseparable.
“Act 2: The Empty Center” – a religious ritual ruin – and “Act 3: The Revealed Constellation” follow at the school, the latter of which sees a glass-roofed corridor turned into a stained-glass chamber, where metal hands hold up K-pop light sticks against a techno chorus – not in supplication to a god, but as an independent collective finding its own path.


We Carry Our Pain Like a Language, by the Palestinian artist and writer Yazan Khalili, is a circle of baseball cap stacks, each embroidered with a fragment of a poem that can only be read in its entirety when displayed in order. They are for sale to raise money for Palestine-focused initiatives and thus designed to be dispersed.
A continuation of his 2025 work Against Total Meaning, it makes us think about the events in Gaza and the West Bank while also raising questions about the commodification of art and, to return to the curators’ phrase, the ruins of speech.
Burmese artist Moe Satt brings his project Body, Face and Fingers, a performance and installation exploring how we communicate without words, and the late Pakistani women’s-rights campaigner Lala Rukh’s works based on Hindustani classical music are on display.
However, for a biennale about dissidence, it is disappointingly safe. Little truly resonates with how people in this particular region live in an unsettling political climate, apart from Korean documentary maker Lee Dong-keun’s multimedia account of the legacy of Japanese occupation on the Busan island of Gadeokdo, as well as conflicts in places such as Okinawa and Taiwan, and the continuing influence of larger powers.
The biennale is not so much a dissident chorus but one that is in accord with the values frequently championed by the contemporary art world today, therefore taking few risks.
Another concern is the uneven quality. In some cases, artist’s biographies seem to be used to prolong presentations beyond what the works themselves can sustain.
None of this detracts from Khalaf and Simons’ contagious conviction that art can still make a difference, but “Dissident Chorus” is most persuasive when it is not simply presenting the correct politics.
Busan Biennale: Dissident Chorus continues until November 1, 2026


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A not so ‘Dissident Chorus’? Busan Biennale 2026 makes some political noise

The lobby of the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art features a selection of images taken from The House of Korean Protest Songs archive during the 2026 Busan Biennale. Photo: Enid Tsui

The Warriors Return (1999) by Abdul Qadim Haqq. Photo: Enid Tsui

A classroom transformed by Mongolian artist Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar. Photo: Enid Tsui

Part of Hyunsung Park’s transformation of the kitchen in the empty high school building used for the Busan Biennale. Photo: Enid Tsui

A scene from Joshua Serafin’s Whispering Pleas of the Eternal Echoes. Photo: Enid Tsui 

A view of Sungsil Ryu’s Ten Thousand Dreams. Photo: Enid Tsui

Dew Kim’s Act 3: The Revealed Constellation transforms a bridge connecting two buildings in the Busan Nam High School into a corridor of stained glass. Photo: Enid Tsui

We Carry Our Pain Like a Language (2026) by Yazan Khalili. Photo: Enid Tsui

5 days in Seoul: the best things to do, from palaces and museums to the DMZ

Visitors walks through the Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul on June 21, 2026. (Photo by JADE GAO / AFP)

Visitors wearing traditional hanbok dresses take a selfie in front of Gwanghwamun Gate, the main gate of Gyeongbokgung, a former royal palace in Seoul, on March 16, 2026. Photo: AFP

Visitors walk through Gyeongbokgung, a former royal palace in Seoul, on June 21, 2026. Photo: AFP

Biwon, or the Secret Garden, at Changdeokgung palace. Photo: Shutterstock

Seoul’s ancient city wall with urban sprawl behind it. Photo: Shutterstock

A cruise along the Han River in Seoul. Photo: Shutterstock

Tourists look out on Seoul from the Lotte World Tower observation deck. Photo: Xinhua

The National Museum of Korea, among the largest museums in the world, takes visitors through 5,000 years of Korean history. Photo: Shutterstock

Visitors walk beside a military fence at Imjingak Park near the demilitarised zone (DMZ) in Paju, South Korea, on November 22, 2023. Photo: AFP

Visitors use binoculars to look at the North Korean side of the demilitarised zone (DMZ) from an observatory in Paju, north of Seoul. Photo: Sopa Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Seoul Art Week 2026: Korean collectors on their passion, artists to watch, shows to catch

Goo Chan-oo, an office worker, sitting among his art collection. Photo: Goo Chan-oo; Kim Dong-un (right) and his wife Hwang Yoo-sun photographed at a Georg Baselitz exhibition during one of their holidays. Photo: Kim Dong-un and Hwang Yoo-sun; The collector, art historian and educator Lee So-young. Photo: Lee So-young

Goo Chan-oo, a South Korean “office worker collector”, with some of his art collection. He and other collectors talk about their collecting experiences, which artists they are watching and the exhibitions to catch during Seoul Art Week, which runs from August 31 to September 6. Photo: Goo Chan-oo

 Lee So-young is an art collector, historian and educator. Photo: Lee So-young

Artworks inside Lee’s home. Photo: Lee So-young

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Perdu CXIII (2021) by Lee Bul, part of Kim and Hwang’s collection. Photo: courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac

“Office worker collector” Goo Chan-oo began collecting almost by accident a decade ago. Photo: Goo Chan-oo

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The opening ceremony on March 19.    SCMP / Chloe Lung

Artists perform during the opening ceremony of “Spectrosynthesis Seoul” in South Korea, an exhibition at Art Sonje Centre featuring the works of 74 artists with links to the LGBTQ community that runs until June 28. Photo: Instagram/artsonje_center

Installation view of “Spectrosynthesis Seoul”. Photo: Chloe Loung

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A work by Kang-seung Lee features a cactus that belonged to Harvey Milk, an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ rights in America who was assassinated. Photo: Chloe Loung

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A work by American artist Mark Bradford at the exhibition. Photo: Chloe Loung

Installation view of the exhibition’s second floor. Photo: Chloe Loung

A work by Dew Kim at the exhibition shows the different power dynamics and tension during physical intimacy. Photo: Chloe Loung

Gay bar culture is a prominent theme on the second floor of the exhibition, which features some eye-catching pieces. Photo: Chloe Loung

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A screenshot from the video “Ludwig” (2018), Diego Marcon. (Photo courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London)

Chinese artist Ge Yulu’s “Hall of Use Less” at “Youth Palace: or, some small acts of self-making”, which runs at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum until September 20, 2026. Photo: Ling

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Li Ming’s suspension bridge is inspired by the “Path of the Brave” obstacle courses once common in Children’s Palaces. Photo: Ling

A still from “Ludwig” (2018), by Diego Marcon. Photo: courtesy of Diego Marcon and Sadie Coles HQ, London

“Misfits F” (2021), by Nairy Baghramian. Photo: courtesy of Jenny Yeh, Winsing Arts Foundation

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This year, South Korea’s oldest biennale explores politics through sound, performance and art, but does it truly challenge the status quo?


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A not so ‘Dissident Chorus’? Busan Biennale 2026 makes some political noise

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}This year, South Korea’s oldest biennale explores politics through sound, performance and art, but does it truly challenge the status quo?

This year, South Korea’s oldest biennale explores politics through sound, performance and art, but does it truly challenge the status quo?