Collectivity Across Cultures: Pangrok Sulap in Gwangju

This is an edited transcription of a presentation delivered during “Radical Printmaking in Asia,” a panel discussion for The Politics of Print: elephant in the room, staged in January 2026 as part of STPI’s annual Print Show & Symposium.

When I was invited to be Artistic Director of the 2023 Gwangju Biennale, I thought about what it meant to return to South Korea, where I grew up and was educated, as a curator working and living internationally. What could I convey to the public, in the middle of COVID and amid global issues like climate justice and Black Lives Matter, which are somehow connected? Local communities like those in Gwangju are not isolated from the world, so I began to consider these global issues both on a personal level and as an entangled whole, while reflecting on art’s function and role in society.

The Biennale’s title, “soft and weak like water,” comes from the Dao De Jing by Laozi. In Korea, I studied the Chinese classics as a child, which gave me a basic understanding of deep philosophical ideas like Taoism. That was the beauty of growing up in this part of the world, where epistemological and philosophical learnings happened through everyday experiences. My grandparents would say things like: “Be more like water, not like bamboo, which can be broken. Just go around if you must; be observant, persistent, and patient.” That’s interesting when you think about how art can respond to complex problems.

With that in mind, the Biennale’s four sub-themes—Luminous Halo, Transient Sovereignty, Ancestral Voices and Planetary Times—were abstract but actually quite concrete. I wanted to move between planetary ideas around what is happening here and now—“here” meaning this planet—as a story unfolding across space and time. Water became both a metaphor and a method, since it can wash and submerge things, which mirrors art’s ability to create conditions to deal with world issues on an everyday level, while imagining and acting on better futures.

I had to start with Gwangju, given the decision to establish the Gwangju Biennale in 1994 was due to the historic, student-led Gwangju Uprising that erupted on 18 May 1980. After 20 years of dictatorship under Park Chung-Hee, who was assassinated in December 1979, a small opportunity emerged to think about democracy. South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world after the Korean War ended in 1953. No industrial infrastructure or manufacturing really existed until the mid-to-late 1960s, after which the country saw rapid economic growth as an export-driven economy. A lot of people consider this a golden age: but at what expense? Once we made toys, shoes, and clothes, industries moved to countries with cheaper labour, which connects to the Gwangju Uprising and the struggles of factory workers and farmers at the time. The students who led the movement acted as a sort of ethical front of the collective consciousness: they had the moral privilege to imagine a future for the country.

While a lot of students across South Korea demonstrated in early 1980, it was only in Gwangju that the students took to the streets on 18 May. That is why the movement was quickly crushed, first by the police and then the military, which was followed by South Korea’s transition to a paramilitary government that year. This quick succession of historic moments shaped the Gwangju Biennale. Despite being a pivotal moment in Korean history, many Koreans learned about the Gwangju Uprising retrospectively, since the story of how Gwangju bore the brunt of the democratic movement for the country remained buried until it was revealed publicly to the nation in the 1990s. Many died and countless are still missing—the exact numbers are still debatable even after many trials and court cases. This is why Gwangju decided to create an international biennale: to reconcile the people’s sacrifice in this very unresolved chapter in Korean history.

Jumping forward a few decades to the 2023 Gwangju Biennale, I thought about the artistic collective Pangrok Sulap. Their generative approach demonstrates how to think about collective struggles across cultures, times, and places with a sense of hope and resistance, while remaining anchored to local communities. The collective was founded in 2010 in Ranau, Sabah, in Malaysia. They are artists, curators, writers, researchers, activists, designers, musicians, and entrepreneurs whose commitment to their communities was something I valued and wanted to highlight, since their practice opens up discussions around what it means to work as both artists and as a collective.

Pangrok Sulap’s use of woodblock prints is striking, as is the pragmatism in their approach: to use an accessible printing technique to work with communities and political situations as part of an everyday practice. The same form of woodblock printing was also important for the Gwangju Uprising generation and those that followed. Activists and democratic movement leaders used woodblock prints to tell the story of the Uprising when it was prohibited. These underground images circulated to make visible hidden histories about state repression. The socialist-realist style was chosen for impact, as the most legible way to show the people’s struggle: some were more propaganda-like, while others faithfully recorded what happened graphically.

O Yoon was quite a prominent figure in this woodblock print movement. I grew up with the artist’s images in my university years through demonstrations and marches, when the street became another lecture room—we even managed to change a couple of presidents. I included a selection of woodblock prints that he created around the 1970s and ’80s in the Gwangju Biennale. At the time, there were suspicions that these prints were produced by North Korean spies infiltrating factory workers’ unions or student movements to spread lies. But really, they functioned as important tools for learning and understanding: a way to process an unfinished history.

Struck by the legacies of these images, Pangrok Sulap immediately decided to use some of the iconic woodblock prints created at the time of the Uprising and its immediate aftermath for the Gwangju Biennale. Depicting moments of collective resistance, solidarity, and mourning related to the May 18 Democratic Movement, as well as visual reinterpretations of archival images and documented recordings of daily life in Gwangju, the collective created Gwangju Blooming (2023), an installation of eight large woodcut prints on pink, grey, and purple dyed blackout cotton.

The collective’s idea to engage directly with the May 18 legacy prompted me to think about why we might connect Pangrok Sulap’s practice, which draws on a context that South Koreans might be unfamiliar with, to Gwangju. Those who were involved in the Uprising and who made the images that the collective referred to are still alive and very much engaged in the uprising’s legacy. These include Yeon-Gyun Kang, a senior artist still living and working in Gwangju, whose Petrified Wood series (2017–2023), comprising five map-like black-ink-on-Fabriano-paper-prints, was included in the show. It is through the lives of artists like him that the resistance continues. This continuation was witnessed recently through the protests against former president Yoon, who was impeached in April 2025 after trying to unlawfully impose martial law in South Korea in December 2024. (He was subsequently jailed for life in February 2026.) Those events once again demonstrate how serious people in Korea are when they come out to the streets, using posters, placards, and signs to express their demands.

The iconography of these demonstrations—images of our land, people, culture and traditions—is important, which returns us to those prints created around the Gwangju Uprising. Beyond socialist realism, you can observe artistic connections to early Chinese revolutionary era woodblock prints in these compositions, as well as links beyond the region, including German expressionism. What these movements all convey is a shared sensibility: a most intimate desire to live in peace and with justice, which Pangrok Sulap shares. This is what linked a 21st-century collective from Malaysia to the 20th-century prints that tell the Gwangju Uprising’s story in Korea: a history that resonates locally while reverberating with struggles elsewhere.

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One Work zooms in on a single work or series by an artist to contextualise historical pieces from contemporary perspective, or to illuminate how artists today are redefining printing and paper-based practices.