GWANGJU.- The 16th Gwangju Biennale announces its theme, You must change your life. Inspired by the final line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, the Biennale explores the transformative power of art in responding to the multiple crises and urgencies of our time.

Led by Artistic Director Ho Tzu Nyen, together with curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee, and Brian Kuan Wood, the Biennale will take place from September 5 to November 15, 2026, at the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall.

In Rilke’s 1908 poem, an imagined, fragmentary ancient sculpture releases within its viewer an overwhelming surge of emotional energy which compels new commitments and life-changing resolutions. The intensity of this encounter culminates in the line: “You must change your life.” Rather than specify 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.

“We imagine this exhibition moving viewers across different scales and speeds of change,” said Artistic Director Ho Tzu Nyen. “Few cities embody the ideals and the experience of change more powerfully than Gwangju, whose history of democratic struggle continues to resonate globally. Here, change is not abstract—it is lived history.”

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 embodied experience. Participating artists explore personal and collective struggles as material, spiritual and lived transformations.

The 16th Gwangju Biennale adopts a deliberately concentrated format featuring the smallest number of artists in its history, privileging intensity over accumulation and deepening engagement by presenting multiple works traversing many of the participating artists’ life trajectories. What emerges is not a survey of isolated gestures, but the persistence over time that makes visible the shape of artistic practice. The Biennale proposes a kind of power not defined by expansion and inflationary growth, but by concentration and capacity. By focusing resources and attention, the exhibition allows artworks to unfold across different speeds and orders of magnitude for sustained encounters between artists and audiences.

You must change your life considers how change operates across bodies and systems, asking how art, through disciplined and repeated practice, cultivates the capacity to redirect forces at work in the world.