Among the most intriguing works recently on view at Korea’s sixth Gwangju Biennale was “A Second History,” an archival installation by Chinese artist Zhang Dali. The piece comprises scores of propaganda photos, as they appeared in doctored form in mid-20th-century Chinese publications such as People’s Pictorial, Liberation Army Journal and China Pictorial, matched in wall displays with their unaltered source images. In every case, something crucial has been changed: a figure from one shot transposed to the background of another, a smiling portrait of Mao added to the exterior wall of a factory school, distasteful sights or politically undesirable individuals deleted from views of the PRC’s Communist utopia.In one particularly memorable example, Mao’s body lies in state before a semicircle of Party dignitaries. In the original photo, the ranks of shoulder-to-shoulder comrades, their heads respectfully bowed, are unbroken. But in the published version, dark gaps appear. Certain no-longer-privileged (or worse) individuals have disappeared, leaving only a smudgy darkness in their place. Almost as chilling as the juxtaposed photos themselves are the texts–sometimes from English or French editions of the Chinese journals–which either knowingly further the deception or fall for it whole-hog. These passages are an implicit reminder of the geopolitical gullibility that once made Maoism a romantic creed among radical leftists in the West and that continues–as the show inadvertently made clear–in a different, subtler, but no less dangerous form today. For the Gwangju Biennale 2006 was a purportedly benign multicultural exhibition that in fact masked elisions and interpolations of disturbing political import.