Alternative visions: in a provocative curatorial gesture, this year's Gwangju Biennale was largely dedicated to—and determined by—independent artist groups and alternative spaces - Report From Gwangju - Critical Essay

Nails were still being driven in during the opening. Overall, most of the artists finished their installations--the major exceptions being Chinese artist Xu Tan, who had intended to place flat-screen computers in the men's room as part of his Toilet Project, and Philippine artist Judy Freya Sibayan, who was to be assigned people to wear her portable "galleries" for the duration of the exhibition. (Sibayan reacted to the absence of her personnel by tacking a protest letter to a wooden cross and placing it in her installation area.)

The full title of Esche and Hou's exhibition, "Project 1: Pause," is a pun on the Chinese character that means "stop" and also contains the calligraphic element for "pavilion." The show's idiosyncratic tone was clear from the threshold. Straight ahead from the entrance stood the Biennale's "office"--a sort of flower-power tree house suspended over the exhibition, complete with Taiwanese artist Michael Lin's abstract-floral painting on the floor of the architects' scaffolding-and-plywood structure. It was from here, rather than a private office behind closed doors, that Esche and Hou directed the installation.

Just to the right of the entrance was the Mexico City gallery Kurimanzutto's Friendly Capitalism, which could best be described as an "action." (Kurimanzutto was the sole exception here--a commercial gallery and artists collective, albeit an "alternative" one.) Physically, the installation consisted simply of a photocopy machine, a stack of A4-size paper and a blue carpet. But these spare materials were used to make--in real time, during public hours--knockoff copies of the exhibition catalogue, which were sold to Biennale-goers for 20,000 won (about $17), less than a quarter of the "real" cover price--a most appropriate project for counterfeit-mad Asia.

Keeping up the mood of inspired pranksterism, the Russian AES Group's Sheltered Sky consisted of a Bedouin tent just below the "office." (If you took off your shoes, you could help yourself to the hookah inside.) According to AES's Tatiana Arzamasova, the idea originally came from a chance encounter with an Egyptian textile manufacturer. They asked him to make a tent printed with digitally manipulated photographs, which re-imagine Western cities as they might look under Muslim domination--Big Ben with a minaret, Notre Dame as a mosque and the Statue of Liberty in a burka. It was a biting and very funny satire on colonialism's rewriting of landscapes and cities, the visual background noise so rarely questioned for being so familiar.

Nearby was Flags, a project by Plastique Kinetic Worms, an artist-run space in Singapore. Visitors contributed ideas for flags, which were then turned into reality by several Korean seamstresses employed on-site, the results being gradually added to the installation.

These three pieces--the first you encountered in the exhibition--set much of its tone. The show was playful, interactive and topical, but somewhat short on complex, multilayered works of art. It's as if the curators, dispirited by a commercialized art world that seems to have become a circus, decided to take things in hand and make the best possible circus.