Becoming an Acronym: Taiwan at the 2026 Gwangju Biennale In the weeks leading up to the 16th Gwangju Biennale, scheduled to open in September 2026, a dispute emerged over the name under which Taiwan would appear in the Biennale’s Pavilion program. Taiwan’s participation, organized by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA), had been proposed, contracted, and prepared under the name “Taiwan Pavilion” since earlier this year. The first unsettling sign surfaced in a gro

I have continued reading Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts of War in Vietnam (a book I mentioned in my previous post). What struck me about Kwon’s work was how completely and carefully it establishes the material significance of ghosts without asking the reader to “believe” in them. He brings in major theories, scholars, histories, ethnographic observations, and the concrete consequences of people’s relationships with the dead, until there is very little room left to dismiss ghosts as irr

In August 2025, less than a month after I had returned to Korea from the United States, I attended a Critical Island Studies conference held at Jeju National University, where Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was scheduled to participate in a roundtable and give a keynote the following day. The conference had been overwhelmed by the prospect of Spivak’s presence well before she actually appeared. There was excitement, but also an extraordinary amount of pressure around the event. T