“10,000 LIVES,” THE 2010 GWANGJU BIENNALE, was an ambitious undertaking—attempting nothing less than to get a grasp on the visible as such. Ultimately, I suppose, this is the purpose to which many international exhibitions aspire, but it is hardly ever engaged with such determination and such willingness to grapple with the power of the eye, the life of pictures, and the role of art in a world flooded by imagery. Organized by New York–based curator Massimiliano Gioni and borrowing its title from an almost endless epic by Korean author Ko Un—who, during a two-year imprisonment for his involvement in the democratic uprising in Gwangju in 1980, began a nearly thirty-year project of recalling and visualizing every person he ever met—the exhibition likewise seemed almost inexhaustible.

The inclusion of highlights from other exhibitions—such as Dieter Roth’s magnificent Solo Szenen (Solo Scenes), 1997–98, once placed at the center of the Venice Biennale; and Fischli & Weiss’s vast installation Visible World, 2000–10, which was featured in their 2006 retrospective, and transforms the banality of three thousand snapshots into an encyclopedia of the globalized gaze—proved that the aim was not to impress art-world professionals with new trophies but rather to present works that would be relevant discoveries for a Korean audience, even if some were already prominent in a Western context. To this category of works, one could also add Hans-Peter Feldmann’s 9/12 Frontpage, 2001, an entire room filled with explosive front pages of international newspapers from the day after the attack on the World Trade Center; Mark Leckey’s Turner Prize–winning Cinema-in-the-Round, 2006–2008, an exceptional meditation on the transmission of images in the tradition of Aby Warburg, updated for the age of The Simpsons; and artist-collector-researcher Ydessa Hendeles’s massive Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002, a two-story library of stuffed bears. The danger here is that such an approach may verge on condescension, treating the local venue and population as subjects to be educated; the inclusion and reframing of several historical Asian works did not necessarily solve this problem but did seem to acknowledge it. For example, the show incorporated the famous Rent Collection Courtyard, 1965, an extensive group of realist sculptures depicting inhabitants of a Chinese village, originally produced by a group of students from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (the version here was recast in fiberglass in 1974–78). The work is a prime example of socialist realism’s ambition to reduce art to education—nonetheless remaining so weird that it gains meaning in a way that neither the politicians nor the craftspeople involved could have predicted.

There were also a few rediscoveries of long-forgotten gems, such as the magical 1960s films by German Pop artist Peter Roehr, and a hallucinatory advertisement for a Japanese bicycle company by Jikken Kobo, the “Experimental Workshop” that brought together a number of Japanese writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers in collective projects of great beauty. Their Ginrin (Silver Wheel), 1955, is a dreamy promotional film reminiscent of Mary Poppins but set in the context of the postwar Japanese avant-garde. Among new works, two of the most remarkable were produced by Polish artists, both of whom deal directly with issues of blindness and insight in a drastic—and, in Jakub Julian Ziółkowski’s case, even brutal—fashion. Ziółkowski’s sprawling illustrations based on Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye explore every possible form of violence in this notoriously transgressive text. My favorite work, however, was Artur Żmijewski’s touching video portrait of blind people asked to paint the world in colors they have never seen but to which they obviously relate with the greatest of emotions. This discourse of the blind was the most acute counterpoint to Fischli & Weiss’s tables of flat visibility, and it was ultimately the work that made my trip to Korea worthwhile: a surprising exploration of a kind of vision that has nothing to do with physical sight.

The large number of art events across the globe has, of course, produced a sense of fatigue, but it is important to remember that these shows have a different significance in venues with less institutional infrastructure. “10,000 Lives” was not what we normally expect from biennials that understand themselves as experimental production sites, inviting artists to generate new projects in an unpredictable way. No: This was a meticulously planned, museum-style exhibition in which every piece was contextualized. Gioni allowed himself a few curatorial tricks, such as hanging Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans, 1981, next to digital prints of Evans’s original 1930s photographs, and staging a reconstruction of Mike Kelley’s seminal 1993 exhibition “The Uncanny” without involving the artist. This museumlike approach gave the whole endeavor a slightly safe feeling—geared less toward risk than toward control. Overall, though, it was a project that managed to play in several registers at once, exploring philosophical themes of interest to a local audience while also inserting some of the world’s most fashionable artists, known only to specialized circles in Europe and New York. Such modishness was, in fact, another point of criticism. A woman who is flawlessly beautiful is uninteresting, someone said. Well, I have nothing against Grace Kelly. But universal beauty may still be a myth.

Daniel Birnbaum is Director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and a Contributing Editor of Artforum.