ASAKUSA Pavilion in Gwangju Biennale — "Step After the Last Step"
2026.9.5 (Sat) – 11.15 (Sun)
Yangnim Culture Spring, 30 Seoseopyeong-gil, Nam-gu, Gwangju, South Korea
Opening Hours: 10:00–17:00, Tuesday–Sunday (Closed Mondays, and Sep 24/25/26, Oct 9)
Opening Ceremony: 4 September, 15:00–17:00
ASAKUSA, a curator-run project space housed in a renovated traditional wooden building, has been dedicated to collaborative curatorial practices and critical dialogue since its founding in 2015. Located in Asakusa, Tokyo—a culturally vibrant neighborhood—it has presented experimental programs by artists and scholars from Japan and abroad that engage with social issues, including geopolitical complexities, particularly those of East Asia. Each program has been developed by a small, project-based team assembled for the occasion. For the 16th Gwangju Biennale, ASAKUSA proposes a pop-up pavilion that resituates itself within Yangnim Culture Spring in Gwangju's historic district, where the act of crossing national and institutional borders itself becomes a self-reflexive curatorial proposition.
Across moving images, photography, comics, diaries, and letters, the exhibition The Step After the Last Step sheds light on figures and movements who have sought alternative ways of being in the midst of historical upheaval and social transformations—anarchists, counter-hegemonic thinkers, those who live within and navigate across the division, and those cultivating space for knowledge production. It questions how social categories, such as gender, sexuality and class, intersect with labor, access to choice and conditions of mobility.
The exhibition brings together artists Heidrun Holzfeind, Tomoko Kikuchi, Marina Lisa Komiya, Jooyoung Lee and Yoshiko Shimada, whose practices challenge the persistence of historical forms of domination, conflict, division and amnesia in modern political and social power structures as latent forces within everyday life, as ghostly residues in the present. In the ASAKUSA Pavilion, border-crossing experiences and queer lives that have not been sufficiently preserved in official records reverberate as the narratives of "illegible beings" within the exhibition space of Gwangju—a pivotal site of the minjung (people's) movement.
Floor Plan
Works
Marina Lisa Komiya — 2F
1. Decomposition of Aspergillus luchuensis
Mixed-media installation, 8 min 26 sec, 2026
Marina Lisa Komiya focuses on a new theory of time and explores technologies of reproduction that emerge from a queer perspective. Their work often examines the power dynamics surrounding reproduction and warfare technologies, as shaped by enduring imperialism and heteronormative patriarchy. Working as a manga artist, they narrate the lives of Japanese war brides and American soldiers, whose experiences were shaped by wartime national ideologies, while also imagining queer lives that have remained unrecorded. Across a range of media, including manga and biotechnology, these intersections inform Komiya's approach to exploring how bodies, technologies and social systems are shaped by histories of power, exclusion, prohibition and desire.
Their new installation, Decomposition of Aspergillus luchuensis (2026), develops from ongoing research into the microorganisms currently used to produce Korean makgeolli, which are derived from Okinawan kōji mold introduced under Japanese colonial rule. Japanese researchers cultivated Okinawan brewing traditions and brought them to Korea as a "Japanese" technology, while home brewing in Korea was suppressed and criminalized under liquor tax law, leading to the gradual disappearance of traditional starter yeast in the country. At the same time, Komiya takes a critical look at the propaganda manga character "Yamato Family" used by Imperial Japan and published both in Japan and Korea during World War II, which depicts an idealized heteronormative family model under wartime patriotic conditions. In the work, the images based on these manga characters are generated by mold. By cultivating microbial cultures, they reveal how manga-style characters have been mobilized to uphold imperialism and colonial conditions, while destabilizing the distinction between undesirable rotting and beneficial fermenting. Through the decomposition and decay of the "ideal family," Komiya also seeks to dismantle colonial structures of power.
Support: BioClub Tokyo, Yuki Konno, Sarthak Shah
Support for the installation: Taichi Moriyama
Jooyoung Lee — 2F
2. Let's Walk and Chat Together: Yokohama Chapter—Personal journey inspired by anarchist Kaneko Fumiko
Publication (mediabus, Seoul and Multiple Spirits, Tokyo/Vienna, 2026), 12.8 x 18.2 cm, Korean, English and Japanese editions, 2012/2026
3. Study for Seaweed
Seaweed pouch, alginate, glycerine, calcium choloride, knitting collaboration with Seoyoung Kang, 2026
Jooyoung Lee's practice often unfolds through collaboration and communal projects, examining the relationships between overlooked elements and the layered histories embedded within everyday scenery. Let's Walk and Chat Together: Yokohama Chapter—Personal journey inspired by anarchist Kaneko Fumiko is a diary-format publication that follows the life and surroundings interactions of Fumiko Kaneko, a Japanese anarchist who died in prison in 1926 after being convicted of plotting to assassinate the emperor. Born in Yokohama in 1903 and spending her childhood in both Japan and Korea under oppressive family conditions, Kaneko witnessed the March First Movement and later formed a political and personal alliance with Korean independence activist Park Yeol. Throughout her life, she advocated for women's autonomy and abolition of hierarchy, resisted authoritarian power, and maintained an indomitable spirit. In Lee's diary, started during her time at an artist residency in Koganecho, Yokohama, in 2012, the artist traces Kaneko's trajectory while reflecting on her own encounters and conversations with locals. She travels to Yamanashi, home to Kaneko's only visible trace in Japan, and visits various places in the port city of Yokohama that remind her of Incheon, another port city in South Korea. Her reflections reveal the intersecting colonial-modern histories and the complex relations between Korea and Japan, as well as the socio-political conditions shaped by the presence of U.S. military bases.
Following the 2017 Korean film Anarchist from Colony, the South Korean government posthumously awarded Kaneko the Order of Merit for National Foundation in 2018, in recognition of her resistance against Japanese imperialism. Later, another film and several publications about Kaneko introduced her life and philosophy to a much wider audience, however, she has largely remained out of the public spotlight due to her radical stance against the Japanese emperor system and her nihilistic worldview.
On the occasion of the ASAKUSA Pavilion, after a 14-year pause in an unfinished editing process, the project is finally published in Korean and English, with a newly translated Japanese edition and new drawings.
Support: Kyungrim Lim Jang (mediabus)
Design: Mai Endo (Multiple Spirits)
Yoshiko Shimada — 2F
4. Documentation of Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman
2012–ongoing
5. Documentation of Being a Statue of Non-freedom of Expression
12 min 46 sec, 2019
Artist and researcher Yoshiko Shimada has long engaged critically with cultural memory, historical amnesia and the complex interrelation of gender, power and politics, questioning the role of women mobilized within structures of Japanese imperialism, wartime ideology and military violence. In her ongoing performance series, Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman (2012–ongoing), she appears with her mouth taped shut, dressed in a kimono and her body painted gold, sitting silently for a period of time. Her performance is modeled on the Statue of Peace by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung, which depicts a girl in a hanbok, seated beside an empty chair. First performed in front of the Japanese Embassy in London and subsequently at contested sites of cultural memory, Shimada deliberately performs a "Japanese comfort woman" to draw attention to the denial of the existence of "Japanese comfort women" and challenge the reduction of the issue to a narrowly national political framework. Like the Statue of Peace and the protests and activities surrounding it worldwide, this work resists the silencing of sexual violence and slavery and the stigmatization of survivors, while calling for a broader reflection on a structural violence intensified by militarization. In front of Yangnim Culture Spring and at the entrance of Penguin Village, the Statue of Peace stands, commemorating Lee Ok Seon, one of the survivors. In the pavilion, the documentation of Shimada's performances is presented along with a slideshow of Being a Statue of Non-freedom of Expression, a collection of people around the world becoming a "comfort women statues" as part of a project with Monica Meyer, in response to the censorship at the 2019 Aichi Triennale, which included an image of the Japanese emperor as well as Kim's Statue of Peace.
Tomoko Kikuchi — BF
6. I and I
[From the right]
Lala, Pandra, Janjie, Sichuan Province, Inkjet print, 37.2 x 55.8 cm, 2011
Sanjie in the Mirror, Beijing, Inkjet print, 37.2 x 55.8 cm, 2006
Yangyang Rehearsaling in the Dressing Room at the Bar "Point Zelo," Hebei Province, Inkjet print, 55.8 x 37.2 cm, 2007
Dandan in the Dressing Room at the Bar "Love Island," Beijing, Inkjet print, 55.8 x 37.2 cm, 2007
Guimei at the Mirror, Chongqing, Inkjet print, 37.2 x 55.8 cm, 2011
Hua Standing by the Yangtze River, Chongqing, Inkjet print, 37.2 x 55.8 cm, 2008
Photographer Tomoko Kikuchi has documented individuals who are navigating their own lives amid sociocultural changes and economic pressures while grappling with loneliness and internal conflict. By cultivating close, long-term relationships with them, Kikuchi portrays their everyday lives with a sense of intimacy. The series I and I (2006-) focuses on the everyday lives of queer communities in China, particularly drag queens and transgender individuals, against the backdrop of the country's rapid economic growth and sweeping social transformations. Taken in various regions, the photographs offer a nuanced portrayal of their lived realities, vividly capturing the emotions, tensions, and contradictions as well as the transition of the inner self.
Tomoko Kikuchi — BF
7. Friction Border
Sound, color, 18 min 15 sec, 2026
Drawing on her nearly two-decade-long dialogue with people with various migratory backgrounds in South Korea, her new video work, Friction Border (2026), takes a different approach to gaps between lived experience and society, and ultimately to her inquiry into the absolute distance between oneself, others, and histories. In the video, the artist drags a wooden pallet near the DMZ, the South-North Korean border, and the neighboring towns whose condition and landscape have been shaped by successive forms of military intervention—from Japanese imperial legacies to the continued presence of U.S. and South Korean military forces. She walks and stops at sites where traces of historical amnesia and geopolotical, social, and spiritual boundaries are embedded in the scenery—such as a bridge built under the Japanese occupation, a former public cemetery where many unclaimed camptown (gijichon) sex workers were buried, a graveyard for North Korean and Chinese soldiers, and a wartime crematorium—the places haunted by the shadows of colonialism, militarization, gender violence, and separation. Empty and carrying no load, the pallet evokes "the presence of time and memories that cannot be carried away," in the artist's words. Kikuchi brings her own body into these locations, sometimes carrying the pallet on her back, creating friction between the ground and the means of transport, as well as between the sweeping force of history and individual narratives. The work turns our attention to ungraspable voices and invisibilized bodies.
Acknowledgment: Sung Cheol Oh, Kwang Seuk Han, Nelson T-Bai. Murphy, Chang Nam Park, Sang Bong So, Ju Weon Hwang, Guang Jin Kim, IKKO, MYOSEI
Yoshiko Shimada — BF
8. Bigakkō Stakeholder Diagram
145 x 205cm, 2 textile pieces, 2026
9. Archival Materials from Gendaishichōsha Bigakkō
1969-1975
Shimada has also conducted extensive research into post-1968 avant-garde art and social movements, as well as the experimental, anti-institutional art school Bigakkō founded in Tokyo in 1969 by Gendaishichōsha, a publishing house known for its books on radical politics and political philosophy. In response to the stagnation of political thought and activism, Gendaishichōsha saw potential in art and education as spaces for renewed social and intellectual engagement. Bigakkō sought to revive the "anachronistic" ideal of the school as a site for direct and intensive exchange between teachers and students. Its curriculum centered on tewaza (handwork skills) and emphasized learning through sustained, close relationships with teachers. In the pavilion, the artist shares her ongoing research and archival materials of Bigakkō, including inquiries into relationships and connections among those who came together in the 1960s and 1970s.
Heidrun Holzfeind — BF
10. The 49th Year (exhibition version)
Sound, color, 37 min., 2026
Japanese activist and anarchist Toshihiko Kamata was the supposed leader of the Black Helmet Group, a loose coalition of non-sectarian leftists that carried out a series of bombings targeting police outposts in Tokyo in 1971, amid the struggles over the US-Japan Security Treaty, the Vietnam War, and student rights. After eight years in hiding, Kamata was arrested in 1980 and sentenced to life imprisonment. His letters from prison reflect on his militant past and his present life behind bars, while offering critical observations on the social and political conditions of Japan and beyond.
In The 49th Year fragments of his philosophical and poetic reflections spanning almost half a century of imprisonment resonate in contemporary landscapes filmed across Japan along his trajectory. Drawing on the idea of "landscapes as a power device" (*1), the film reveals echoes and remnants of state authority and youthful rebellion, as well as ongoing protest and the quiet presence of ordinary life—workers, older citizens, youth, wild animals and other inconspicuous beings. Their mere being-there, held within the camera's patient gaze, becomes a form of silent dissent in the face of widening social inequalities, pervasive surveillance, and expanding state power in an aging, hyper-capitalist society. The film's telling also shifts subtly: the letters are voiced by a woman, Makiko Watanuki, a social activist and Kamata's longtime supporter and pen-pal. Thereby reshaping the historically male-dominated narratives around landscape theory and political struggle in the 1960s and 1970s.
For the ASAKUSA Pavilion, the film has been re-edited into a shorter installation version, presented alongside photographs Holzfeind captured across Japan of places connected to Kamata's struggle, and related archival materials. Through its nuanced choreography of images, sounds, and spoken texts, the work explores isolation and power, work and aging, and the possibilities for social participation even when freedom of movement is severely restricted. A special Gwangju edition of Sōbō, a series of brochures dedicated to sharing Kamata's letters with supporters, is published in English for the first time. It includes Kamata's letters, a conversation with comrades from the Black Helmet Group, and essays providing historical context for understanding the Long Sixties in Japan.
*1 Masao Matsuda, Fukei no Shimetsu (The extinction of Landscape), Tabata Shoten, 1971.
Acknowledgment: Toshihiko Kamata, Makiko Watanuki, Koyo Yamashita, Norie Fukuda-Matsushima
Artist Biographies
Heidrun Holzfeind (born 1972 in Lienz) is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Cooper Union in New York. Her multidisciplinary practice questions immanent architectural and social utopias and explores the relationships between history and identity, individual histories, and political narratives of the present. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions including ASAKUSA (Tokyo), Secession (Vienna), Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe), CCA Warsaw, Tamayo Museum (Mexico City), Artists Space (New York), as well as at the 2018 Shanghai and Kuandu Biennales, the 55th Venice Biennale, and Manifesta 7. Her films have screened at major festivals including Hot Docs (Toronto), DOK Leipzig, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, the Istanbul Biennale, mumok (Vienna), and NTU Art Center Singapore. Her latest feature-length film, The 49th Year, received the Special Jury Prize at Hot Docs 2026.
Tomoko Kikuchi (born 1973 in Tokyo) graduated from Musashino Art University in 1996 and relocated to Beijing in 1999. Kikuchi's practice examines how individuals negotiate external pressures, social divisions, and inner conflicts, while finding ways of existing within these tensions. Through long-term engagement with her subjects, she explores the fragile yet persistent presence of individuals living between society, history, and personal identity. Working across photography, video, and performance, Kikuchi explores the relationship between the body, place, and historical memory. Kikuchi has developed a long-term artistic engagement with Korea through research, residency, and production. In 2019, she participated in the SeMA Nanji Residency at the Seoul Museum of Art, followed by the Incheon Art Platform Artist Residency in 2020. In 2013, she received the Kimura Ihei Award, followed by the Prix Pictet Japan Award in 2015. Her works are held in collections including the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Kawasaki City Museum, and KADIST Art Foundation.
Marina Lisa Komiya (born 1992 in Atlanta) lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Komiya focuses on exploring new methods of reproduction from a queer perspective across various media such as biotechnology, performance, video works, and manga. Their collaborative projects include Reproductive Garden Project with Chihiro Suzuki and FAQ?, a queer feminist art platform with Kanae Tanigawa. Previously published works include On Their Frontlines, Vol. 1 & 2, which won the Inalco Student Prize at the Emile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature in 2026. They are the CCBT (Co-Creative Transformation of Tokyo) Artist Fellow in 2026. Their work has been shown internationally, including Ford Foundation Gallery (New York) and the Institut Français (Tokyo), and their selected solo exhibitions include CLEAN LIFE at WHITEHOUSE (Tokyo) and Invasive Ale at Studio Voltaire (London).
Jooyoung Lee (born 1970 in Daegue) has been working across a variety of media, including installation, documentation, and publication; much of her practice directly intervenes in the public sphere. Recently, Lee has focused on seaweed as a form of algae that obtains energy from photosynthesis and from light and water, like human beings. As she explores potential applications of seaweed in fermentation and biodegradable materials, she poses questions about sustainable approaches and new future directions for living, organismal visual art. Various residencies have informed her practice, including the MMCA Changdong Studio Residency in Seoul, the Flagfabrikken in Bergen, the Incheon Art Platform residency in Incheon, Program residency in Berlin and Koganecho Area Management Center residency in Yokohama. Lee's work has been exhibited at various venues including the Seoul Museum of Art, the Changdong Studio of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne), Yi Sang's House (Seoul), and Real DMZ Project (Cheorwon).
Yoshiko Shimada (born 1959 in Tokyo) is a visual artist and art historian who lives and works in Chiba. She graduated from Scripps College in 1982, and received a Ph.D from Kingston University, London in 2015. Shimada has developed a body of work that explores themes of nationhood and gender. By investigating the legacies of war and colonialism, she advocates for a feminist art-making practice that serves as a tool for self-examination and complicates the binary of victim and oppressor. She uses printmaking, video, performance, research and archiving for her expression. She is also an art historian and archivist. Her research interests include art and politics in the 1960s and 70s, alternative art education, and feminism. Her art has been shown both in Japan and abroad, including Berlin Biennale (2025) and Venice Biennale (2026). Her recent publications include Omae ga kimeruna! (It's not yours to decide!), (Hakujun-sha, 2023), and upcoming Gendaishicho-sha Bigakko (Suiseisha, 2026).
Exhibition Information
ASAKUSA Pavilion in Gwangju Biennale Project
Step After the Last Step
September 5 – November 15, 2026
Yangnim Culture Spring (30 Seoseopyeong-gil, Nam-gu, Gwangju, South Korea)
Opening Hours: 10:00–17:00, Tuesdays–Sundays
Closed on: Mondays, September 24, 25, 26, and October 9, 2026
Opening Ceremony: 4 September, 15:00–17:00
Pavilion Organizer: ASAKUSA
Artists: Heidrun Holzfeind, Tomoko Kikuchi, Marina Lisa Komiya, Jooyoung Lee and Yoshiko Shimada
Curators: ASAKUSA Pavilion in Gwangju Project Team (Mika Maruyama, Mariko Mikami, Miwa Negoro, Koichiro Osaka)
With support of: Gwangju Biennale Foundation, AEDIT Co., Ltd./ Atsushi Fukai, Land Kärnten
Venue: Yangnim Culture Spring (Head of Center: Ouk Jang, Director: Hyun-jin Kim)
Korean Translation: Hakyung Sim
Technical Consultants and Equipment Coordination: Sijeom (Serene Pac, Jane Lee)
Install Coordination: Seo Yeoreum, Hee-yeong Jang
Install: Seong-hyeon Oh, Do-hwi Jo
Special Thanks to: Gamze Baktir, Ho Bin Kim, Sanghyeok Lee, Kyungrim Lim Jang, Nobuo Mikami, Aya Momose, Heejung Park, Asako Shiraki, Jaemin Shin, Steve Seongmin Ju, Jiwon Yu
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