Gwangju's art biennale is all fired up

In 2003, Chinese artist Geng Jianyi asked his friends to give him stuff they considered to be rubbish. He got boxes of ripped sneakers, a number of tatty office chairs, broken hi-fi speakers and other odd things, a selection of which he proceeded, over the following year, to lay out neatly on white square podiums as if they were the most valuable display objects in a designer fashion arena.

He titled it Useless, displayed it in 2004 as an art installation, and for its 10th anniversary this year this collection of used and "useless" objects is one of the headline exhibits in the Gwangju Biennale, opening next month. "Of course the point being that a few decades before, they probably would hardly have given him anything because the idea of redundancy of materials has changed so swiftly," says Jessica Morgan, curator of this year's edition. "Suddenly an item that would previously have been used until it fell apart - and even then it might have been recycled to become something else - is now trash as soon as it's got a small hole in it."

The Gwangju Biennale - one of the biggest and most significant contemporary art exhibitions in the region - is entering its 10th manifestation. Although many people outside South Korea might not have heard of it, this show, held every two years in five massive halls in a stark white conference complex in the southernmost tip of the country, is in terms of visitor numbers, the biggest biennial art show in the world.

With up to 800,000 visitors expected over two months, it's almost twice the size of the much more famous Venice Biennale, which last year attracted 425,000 visitors over a longer summer period. Yet with most (around 80 per cent) visitors coming from within South Korea, the southern city of Gwangju is still less famous internationally for its art show than for the democratisation movement that in 1980 took its name.

Gwangju was, in many ways, South Korea's Tiananmen: students and young people protesting, violent retaliations all leading, arguably, to a long-term shift in government policy. However, although Morgan says "anyone who works on the biennial has to be aware of the incredibly important context of the uprising", when she signed on as curator in May last year she was aware that anything she did and chose "had to be about now, it can't just be about the past … it was about thinking about what's happening in Korea now and the incredible pace of change, which has a positive as well as a negative side."