The Incheon Women Artists' Biennale was the rare biennial-circuit institution to make gender, not nation or region, the constituting principle of its programme. Founded in 2004 as a local exhibition of women artists in Incheon and developed into an international biennial from 2007 under the joint authority of the Metropolitan City of Incheon and the Biennale Organising Committee, it ran three documented international editions across the second half of the 2000s and the start of the 2010s before the municipal funding base on which it depended was withdrawn.
The Incheon Women Artists' Biennale began as a local exhibition. The project was conceived from the mid-1990s onward by women artists in Incheon — many of them art teachers in the city's public and private schools — who had pursued the long-running annual exhibitions of the Incheon Women Artists Association since the 1980s and aspired to a larger, more outward-facing platform. The inaugural Incheon Women Artists' Biennale in 2004 was that platform's first iteration: an exhibition exclusively of local women artists from Incheon, organised by the Association and held in the port city.
In 2006, the Metropolitan City of Incheon and the newly formed Biennale Organising Committee jointly staged a Pre-International Incheon Women Artists' Biennale — the institutional preparation for an international programme — and in 2007 the first International Incheon Women Artists' Biennale opened, with venues at the Incheon Culture & Arts Center and the Haewon Gallery. From that point onward, the Incheon programme presented itself as what the Biennial Foundation's institutional profile described as distinguished from other biennials held internationally and domestically by its exclusive focus on women artists.
The structure that the international programme adopted across the 2007, 2009 and 2011 editions was a four-part exhibition system: a Main Exhibition that invited only women artists; a Tuning Exhibition that programmed work by both women and men; a Participation Exhibition that gave women artists solo presentations; and an Education Programme of international symposia, conferences and forums on women's art. The architecture of the programme — the Main Exhibition as the gendered argument, the Tuning Exhibition as the dialogic field, the Participation Exhibition as the platform for the individual woman artist's monograph — was the institution's working answer to the question its founding posed: how a biennial structured around women artists could organise its programme without collapsing into either the closed circuit of a women-only space or the diffuse field of a general exhibition that happens to include women.
The 2009 and 2011 editions: international authorship
The 2009 edition was organised under Dr Eunhee Yang as commissioner of the Main Exhibition, with curators Dr Thalia Vrachopoulos (the Greek-American art historian and curator long based at John Jay College, CUNY, in New York) and Sutthirat Supaparinya. The Main Exhibition, titled So Close Yet So Far Away, opened in August 2009 across the Incheon Art Platform and other city venues, with work by approximately one hundred contemporary women artists from Korea and abroad organised into three subsections — Personal Territory, Fluid Interior, and Contested Space — that took the woman artist's relationship to space, both psychological and socio-political, as the curatorial subject.
The 2011 edition — the institution's fifth — was the international apex of the programme. The Main Exhibition, titled Terra Incognita, was curated by Jane Farver, the American curator and former director of MIT's List Visual Arts Center (1999–2011), former chief curator of the Queens Museum of Art (1992–1999) and co-curator of the landmark 1999 exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s–1980s. Farver became the first foreign curator to serve as the biennale's artistic director. Terra Incognita presented work by twenty-eight women from thirteen countries, with the curator setting out the exhibition's working subject as the figure of multiple and parallel universes — the layered fields of metaphor and possibility that the concept offered as a contemporary international subject. The wider 2011 programme was staged at the Incheon Art Platform alongside three additional venues: the Museum of Korean Emigration History, the Bupyeong Arts Center, and the Incheon Educational and Cultural Center for Students.
The withdrawal of municipal support
The institution's funding base — a partnership between the Metropolitan City of Incheon and the Biennale Organising Committee — was the structural condition of its international programme, and the structural feature that turned out to be its limit. The City of Incheon withdrew its engagement with the biennale from 2013, with the loss of municipal funding the proximate cause; the international programme that had run on a biennial rhythm across 2007, 2009 and 2011 did not return on the same scale. The institution's continuing presence in the biennial-circuit literature dates from the three documented international editions of the 2000s and early 2010s rather than from any sustained return on the original terms.
The historical record the institution left is the documentation of those editions in the Asia Art Archive's library (the 2009 Main and Tuning exhibition catalogues; the 2011 Participation: Alone Together catalogue), in the Biennial Foundation's institutional profile, and in the published critical writing that surrounded the international editions — most notably the long English-language essays in the Brooklyn Rail (September 2009) and n.paradoxa feminist art journal. The 2011 IWAB Book Project, Experiences: Asian Women in Global Culture, was the institution's published collection of stories from Asian women living in Asia and across the diaspora — a documentary supplement to the exhibition record.
