GWANGJU .- The Italian Cultural Institute in Seoul presents The Look is A Li(k)e, the Italian Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale. Presented at the Donggok Museum in Gwangju and curated by Irene Campolmi, curator for Art, Technology, and Society at Amos Rex, the exhibition gathers five Italian and Korean artists to investigate the ontology of the look: the image of the self circulating between physical and digital spaces, where global trends drive the shaping of both people and objects to look increasingly alike. Playing on its title—framing a look as both a (digitally approved) like and a (socially constructed) lie—the exhibition examines appearance not as a passive reflection of reality, but as a force that actively constructs perception, function, recognition, and belonging. Moving beyond traditional national representation, the pavilion draws a critical parallel between Italy and South Korea, two nations that have built modern cultural identities around style, reputation, and self-presentation.
In dialogue with the 16th Gwangju Biennale’s overarching theme, You Must Change Your Life, proposed by Ho Tzu Nyen, The Look is A Li(k)e reflects on appearance as a negotiated condition of contemporary life. Structured conceptually as a coded CD—a single format holding diverse genres and soundtracks—the exhibition unfolds across distinct yet interconnected dimensions of visibility, body discipline, gender codification, and the defunctionalization of forms.
The exhibition opens with Italian artist SAGG NAPOLI’s video installation AMEN (2021), which places the body at the center of an inquiry into discipline and physical limits through competitive archery training. As her voice navigates the tension between inward concentration and the unsettling awareness of self-observation, physical endurance becomes a metaphor for continuous psychological negotiation and political embodiment. Korean artist Dew Kim continues this investigation of the body in Legion, Nowhere Whole (2026), a newly commissioned sculptural anti-monument that reflects on what identity looks like when it is reduced to data and commodified across algorithmic networks. Drawing on a state of complete dismemberment, the work transforms mechanisms of surveillance and control into deliberate acts of disobedience and self-determination.
Questions of authority and performed identity are deepened in Korean artist Ru Kim’s new installation Tails of Courage, or the Master’s Pirouette (2026). Following a narrative where a Master attempts to reclaim his lost dog, Courage, by imitating its form—crawling, barking, and growing a tail—the work exposes how identity dissolves through the obsession with becoming another's image, suggesting that resistance begins by refusing to remain trapped within the gaze. The exhibition also presents Ru Kim’s video work, formerly made in this series, called Courageous (2025).
Transitioning into the exhibition space, multidisciplinary Italian artist Raffaela Naldi Rossano shifts the narrative toward desire and relationality in a new environmental installation Partenope's Blind Date Room (2026). Staging a domestic environment for blind encounters between strangers, the artist interweaves Neapolitan and Korean domestic aesthetics, love songs, and traces of the shared sea, framing desire as a collective re-narration and a form of resistance. The concluding track of the exhibition presents Davide Stucchi, whose work also appears in the premise of the show as a reminder that look is not only proper to humans, but also to objects and environments. In works such as Rise & Shine (2026) and Light Switch (2026), everyday domestic and functional items—mirrors, light switches, windows, and ladders—are detached from their utility and embedded into suspended situations where they seem about to perform a new role, which never fully manifests. Stucchi’s practice engages with queer abstraction and minimal spatial interventions, suggesting that since objects can be humanised, humans can be objectified.
Curated by Irene Campolmi. Presenting the works of Raffaela Naldi Rossano, SAGG Napoli, Dew Kim, Ru Kim, Davide Stucchi.
