Jaeyong Park’s Venice Biennale method is simple: stay longer, look harder, and do not stop at the obvious.
The Seoul-based writer, translator, interpreter, curator, educator, and novelist has spent five consecutive Biennale editions seeing every show he can find in Venice — the central exhibition, the national pavilions, collateral exhibitions, and unofficial projects. For Park, the event is not a whirlwind visit but a research trip, one shaped by patience, note-taking, and a collector’s instinct for detail.
His relationship with the Biennale began in 2013, when he contributed to Jonas Staal’s Ideological Guide to the Venice Biennale. After years of compressed visits, he changed course in 2022. That year, he organized a group stay, spent about two weeks in Venice, and moved through the city with art workers and friends, sharing impressions each evening. Since then, he has repeated the full sweep for the art and architecture editions alike.
Park’s approach is inseparable from his work in Seoul. He co-founded Seoul Reading Room, an art archive, and Curating School Seoul, and he co-organizes West Village Comedy Club. He also buys catalogues on site and ships boxes of books back to Korea for the archive, extending the Biennale’s afterlife far beyond Venice.
What he values most is the way slower viewing changes the picture. Pavilions that might seem peripheral can become central once they are seen in context, and unexpected links begin to surface. He points to Montenegro’s pavilion in 2022 as one such discovery, a presentation that opened onto Korean art history in a way a shorter visit likely would not have allowed.
That is the logic behind Park’s Biennale practice: not completion for its own sake, but a disciplined form of attention. In a city where most visitors rush between openings, his method suggests another possibility — that the real work of the Biennale may begin only after the schedule loosens and the eye has time to settle.
