Chinese Curators Pull Out of South Korea's Gwangju Biennale Over Taiwan Labelling
A Chinese curatorial team has withdrawn from South Korea's Gwangju Biennale, protesting the way Taiwan was presented in the exhibition, and Beijing's foreign ministry has taken the dispute official — invoking the one-China commitment that underpins China–South Korea relations.
One of Asia's leading art events has become this week's China–South Korea diplomatic incident. A Chinese curatorial team has announced its withdrawal from the Gwangju Biennale, the South Korean city's flagship contemporary-art exhibition, in protest at what Beijing calls an erroneous presentation of Taiwan in the show. The Chinese embassy in Seoul has publicly backed the protest, and on September 3 the dispute reached the foreign ministry's daily briefing in Beijing.
Asked about the withdrawal, spokesperson Guo Jiakun did not treat it as an art-world squabble. He pointed to the founding document of China–South Korea relations: the joint communiqué in which Seoul recognises the government of the People's Republic of China as "the sole legal government of China" and respects its position that Taiwan is part of China. The ministry's official line, trending on Weibo as a hashtag translating to "we hope the Korean government earnestly implements the one-China principle" (希望韩国政府切实践行一个中国原则), was carried by Xinhua's account and military and state outlets alike — a coordinated rollout that signals how seriously Beijing takes the episode.
What exactly went wrong in Gwangju has not been spelled out in Chinese official statements, which describe only a "Taiwan-related error" (涉台错误做法). In the long record of such disputes, that phrase most often refers to exhibition materials listing Taiwan as a country, or giving it national attributes — a classification Beijing reads as implying separate statehood, and which Korean and Taiwanese institutions have repeatedly stumbled into.
The stakes for the biennale are real. Founded in 1995, Gwangju built its reputation on Asian avant-garde art and Chinese participation has been part of its international standing; a Chinese walkout, endorsed at foreign-ministry level, turns a curatorial detail into a test case that other institutions in the region are watching. For Chinese audiences, the episode lands in familiar territory. Naming disputes have become a recurring flashpoint between Chinese sensibilities and foreign institutions — from sports clubs to fashion houses — and readers followed a nearly identical argument earlier this year, when Real Madrid declined to correct a flood tribute that placed Tibet alongside Nepal.
The pattern on both sides is well rehearsed: an institution treats a labelling choice as administrative, Chinese participants treat it as political principle, and the withdrawal or apology follows. What is less settled is how the second half plays out — whether South Korea's government, which Guo said had repeatedly affirmed the one-China position this year, steps in to referee, or whether the biennale opens this month with its Chinese section standing empty. The exhibition's own answer, and whether it revises the wording that started the row, will be read in Beijing as carefully as the original label was in Gwangju.