A sense of curatorial rigor pervaded many of the compact exhibition spaces of this year’s biennale in Gwangju, a major city in southern Korea known for its rich cultural past and for the May 1980 democratic movement. For its sixth installment, this leading art biennale in East Asia adopted a self-conscious mode of re-examining its raison d’être and selected as its main theme an idea that had in fact existed all along: Asia. Such an inquiry was timely, as the stake to distinguish oneself from others has never been higher for each of the proliferating biennales in Asia—from Singapore to Shanghai to Pusan, to name just the ones concurrent with Gwangju this fall (on the larger phenomenon of Asian biennales and triennales, see John Clark’s recent two-part essay in caa.reviews). The overall sophistication of the 2006 Gwangju Biennale revealed the intellectual taste of artistic director Kim Hong-hee, widely acknowledged as one of the best curators of contemporary art in Korea. She is also renowned for her critical writings on contemporary video and performance art as well as for her able management of the thriving Ssamzie Space in Seoul. “Asia” is at once a concrete reality and an open concept, and...