The 5th Jeju Biennale 2026 attends to the processes through which Jeju's indigenous culture, in its encounter with northern civilizations, has scattered, gathered, and metamorphosed into Iyahong. Taking Iyahong (the refrain of a Jeju folk song) as its central concept, the Biennale embodies the metamorphic process of flowing, mingling, and being reborn. Through Jeju as an island of metamorphosis, it presents the modes of survival and aesthetics cultivated in the coexistence and symbiosis of things and nature, humans and deities.

As crossroads and platform where southern maritime and northern continental cultures intersect, Jeju has formed a distinctively syncretic culture. The island has functioned not as a site of isolation, but as a cultural threshold of ceaseless connection and metamorphosis. Where the 4th Jeju Biennale illuminated Jeju at the heart of maritime civilizational history through the keyword Drift, the 5th Biennale examines Jeju as a site of convergence with northern civilizations — formed at the crossing of history (politics), nature (geology), and polytheistic culture (faith and belief) — through three keywords: Exile, Stone Culture, and Mythology.