Initial Concepts & Exploration

10,000 Lives, the 8th Gwangju Biennale, ran from September 3rd to November 7th, 2010. It was a “sprawling, multifaceted investigation of the ties that bind people to images and images to people” — an obsession with memorializing life & deferring death through the image. This biennale takes its name from Maninbo (10,000 Lives), a 30 volume poem in which the author Ko Un describes every person he’s ever met in his life.

The Gwangju Biennale was initiated in memory of the 1930 South Korean civil uprising; its ambition was to heal the cultural heritage of the city through aesthetic means. It inherits a sense of loss & resilience for its inhabitants. In this rebranding, I aimed to maintain the poetic roots of Ko Un’s original work - a desire to remember every single person he had ever met — by using the “0” and grid symbols to represent multiplicity.