2011 Gwangju Design Biennale

About Gwangju Biennale and Gwangju Design Biennale

The Metropolitan City of Gwangju is a city of art, culture and high-tech industries with photonics and green energy businesses. As a city of art and culture, Gwangju and Gwangju biennale Foundation host two different biennales including international contemporary art festival, Gwangju Biennale and Gwangju Design Biennale established in 1995 and 2004. 1st of September this year is the kick-off for the 4th edition of Gwangju Design Biennale.

What was design? Design was the nineteenth-century child of Western art, architecture, and the crafts. It centered on the creation of industrially produced, mobile objects that moved freely within the global market. The designed object functioned as the aesthetic, technological, and economic focal point of the 20th century. As its movement provided the fulcrum of monumental shifts in power and imagination, it was the symbol, image, tool, and agent par excellence of modernity.


What is design? The world is changing and so is design. The shifting networks and nodes of the global world, the movement of wealth and production, the emergence of new media, the changing values of local and global communities have refocused the issues, problems, and potential of design. Design can no longer be viewed as a privileged hegemony of a limited set of names, objects, forms and modes of production based on an increasingly outdated worldview. We must understand design as a fundamental act of intervening in the way we live.

* Exhibition outline, information
* Artists, artwork images
* VOD, News, Location service

- Contact -
*E-mail : biennale@gb.or.kr