The Korean Pavilion at the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale unfolds as a meaningful exercise in both physical and metaphorical deconstruction and reconstruction, using architecture to mirror the openness of the nation-building process. Titled “Liberation Space,” the pavilion is an exercise in collective thinking, as Seoul-based Goen Choi and New York-based Hyeree Ro bring their divergent sculptural practices into a shared choreography that transforms the pavilion into a “living, breathing monument,” as curator Binna Choi describes it. The pavilion is dynamic, a contemporary monument to national identity and nation-building as shared, continuous efforts shaped through negotiation and compromise and as a necessarily “unfinished project,” since liberation is always still being realized and exercised.
Referencing the fraught three-year period between Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the country’s division in 1948, the exhibition approaches nationhood not as a fixed historical achievement but as a continuous and unfinished process of negotiation, rupture, compromise and renewal. It is a process South Korea is still undergoing, and the pavilion’s question of “nation” arrives at a particularly timely moment, following the events of winter 2024-2025, when a sudden declaration of martial law by an incumbent president was swiftly countered by citizens and lawmakers alike, as well as by soldiers resisting mobilization orders. Add to this the ongoing tensions with North Korea, the country’s colonial past—still not fully reckoned with—and its present relationship with neighboring Japan, as the two countries are drawn into a strategic rapprochement amid a precarious geopolitical situation and China’s expanding regional influence.
“Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest“
Artists: Goen Choi and Hyeree Ro
Venue: La Biennale di Venezia Giardini
Through: Nov. 22, 2026
It was the first time the two countries, whose shared history carries both light and shadow, collaborated to organize and promote both pavilions, embracing on an organizational level an understanding of liberatory movement as an ongoing practice. Yet despite presenting their projects together at a conference in Hong Kong during opening week, very little of this alliance was visible on the ground in Venice beyond the co-hosting of their opening reception, both inside the Giardini and at an evening party—a sign that many questions and tensions remain alive in the diplomatic relations between the two countries.
“I think colonial baggage is there, but this country has been developing rapidly, economically and politically. That has been a major theme,” Choi, the curator, explains, noting how in Korea, as elsewhere, the art field has developed a growing allergy to the nation-state, despite the fact that for many it remains an open and unresolved question. “We do not represent a nation, but we are shaped and influenced by the nation we are affiliated with, and we also have the power to shape it,” she says. “That is what we like to express with ‘Liberation Space,’ because that is a historical time. But in a way, it never stops.”
This was also the first time the two artists had worked together, the curator clarifies. “I thought that was a relevant experiment for the subject we are dealing with. It is not like friends working together to make a new nation. It is people with completely different ideas coming together to build a shared space.”
Rather than simply staging works within the pavilion, the exhibition transforms the building into a dynamic choreography oscillating between the opposing yet complementary conditions suggested by the subtitle “Fortress/Nest.”
Material practice becomes the way the artists enter that conversation. The curator chose these two artists because both work powerfully through craft, material, shaping and placement, rather than through language and concepts alone. The politics here are already embedded in both the materiality and phenomenology of their interventions in the space. The pavilion’s dialogue is built through paper, clay, pipes, movement, infrastructure and bodily encounters. The viewer has to move through the exhibition intentionally, crouching, looking up, following circular pathas and registering how the artists have changed the building itself.
Goen Choi extends her long-standing engagement with infrastructural materials, intervening in the architecture with copper pipes in an acupuncture-like operation performed directly on the pavilion’s body. Thin metal structures pierce, traverse and rupture the architecture with the ambiguity of needles, spears, branches or beams of light, exposing the building itself as an ideological apparatus in continual flux. From the idea of a “fortress”—a structure of defense—Choi’s intervention introduces a space of revelation, openings and dynamic movement that unfolds from within. “The Korean Pavilion is not a fixed symbol but a constellation of forces that continually shake, shift, and reorganize. In engaging with the context of the space, I focused not on creating or adding anything new, but on uncovering, reconsidering, and restoring what is already there,” Choi explains.
That infrastructure, usually invisible, becomes visible through the artist’s work, allowed to penetrate the building and reveal its power. The intervention also reactivates part of the pavilion’s architectural history. When the Korean Pavilion was built in 1995, it included a staircase leading to the second floor and the roof, creating a sense of upward and downward movement. A year later, that passage was walled off and turned into storage. By removing the wall and allowing the pipes to pass through, the artist makes not a conventional architectural intervention so much as a sculptural gesture that liberates the pavilion’s suppressed movement.
Choi describes this intervention through the analogy of a body. “Both of us are approaching the pavilion as a body. What I’m doing is like acupuncture, and is revealing the central nervous system of the building,” she says. “You don’t see the nerves and bloodlines in the human body. These are essential building infrastructure, but they are usually not exposed. I wanted to showcase that kind of essential framework.” The act means liberating the construction, dismantling the architecture as an ideological and political device to expose its mechanisms; Choi reveals nation-building as a condition of permanent tension and reorientation.
Meanwhile, Hyeree Ro has constructed an intimate counter-space of care, endurance and collectivism. Her installation, Bearing, forms what the artist describes as a “pavilion within the pavilion,” a womb-like enveloping environment composed of roughly 4,000 translucent organza circles coated in wax, layered like fish scales or lotus leaves. The material has a delicate, almost membrane-like quality, yet acquires resilience through accumulation into a collective body. “I wanted to build some kind of layer that embraces the space,” Ro explains, “‘To bear’ means to endure and support weight, to change direction, to bear fruit and to give birth.”
As she reconsidered the time and space of holding, enduring and supporting, the mechanical component known as a bearing also came to mind: a device that restricts certain movements and reduces friction in order to enable a desired motion. To her, this “liberation space” is first of all a “field of movement.”
Ro has staged a constellation of eight metal structures inhabited by biomorphic clay parts. She calls them “Stations”—a sequence of eight moments, each devoted to mourning, remembering, waiting, sharing and repair. As sanctuaries and infrastructures for meditation and healing, they suggest how liberation is sustained not through singular heroic acts but through mutual support and continuous adjustment. “We think about what liberation is. Liberation does not happen once. You have to keep practicing it. My project has eight different stations to traverse,” Ro explains.
Those stations do not have fixed functions, but they “function” through use, attention and ritual. Each is meant to be activated by the audience, while a performer’s practice indicates how. It is about daily routines, psychosomatic exercises of embodiment and disembodiment. “I think it is a daily routine and a continuous navigation and negotiation of living and building. Things break. Things do not work. You have to fix them. Just because you swept the floor yesterday does not mean it will be clean today.”
One of the stations, titled Mourning Station, invites viewers to sit on two stools and lean forward toward components installed on the floor. Ro was interested in the posture of mourning, respect and contemplation, and in how the body bends itself toward memory. The work extends beyond individual experience into collective remembrance, connecting physical posture to historical reflection that is both personal and political. Within it, a contribution by artist Christian Nyampeta presents 72 drawings from Gwangju Citizens’ School—a city whose 1980 uprising played a defining role in South Korea’s struggle for democracy and liberation from dictatorship, and whose legacy continues to shape the country’s political consciousness. The drawings are carved onto ceramic plates and piled like vinyl records, suggesting revisitation and listening as necessary acts: ways of returning to recent history, reconciling with it and beginning to heal its trauma.
The strong emphasis on craft also becomes a way of thinking through national identity without reducing the work to nationalism. Clay, paper-making and other crafted materials suggest that, in a national pavilion, such traditional practices—surviving from ancestral time and knowledge—inevitably contributed to the formation of, as much as the reattunement with, any notion of “national” or “Indigenous” identity, even after colonial erasure. “I think it is probably in the DNA,” Ro acknowledges, while noting that paper and clay are also universal materials, present wherever there is earth and human making. Clay, wood and paper connect the work to nature and organic matter, while aluminum and other elements bring in infrastructure and the built environment. The pavilion becomes a negotiation between the organic and the constructed, between human ecology and land, the personal and the collective, as all converge in the fragile, ongoing work of shaping a notion of nation.
