My recent visit to Daegu's Photo Biennale, which commenced last month and runs through October 24 in the South Korean metropolis, got off to an unpromising start, as I was trundled across the country from Seoul to Daegu by bus, covering the 150-odd miles at a snail’s pace. The impressive Culture and Arts Center in Daegu, however, swarmed with the hip of the happening Korean art scene, while critics and curators from across the globe — from Sydney to Chicago, Birmingham to New Delhi — wandered through the museum in murmuring clusters.

In the words of 2010 biennale curator Yang Seung-hak and creative directors Lee Yong-hwan and Walter Bergmoser, the main exhibition, "tru(E)motion," is organized around the "collective visualization" of "people in the present age," "environmental issues," and the "settings of our lives." This formulation relates "true" to an experiential perception of the works, with the "E" for environment — lived as well as built. "Motion," meanwhile, refers to the boundary between the still and moving image that divides video from photography. Broken into three subsidiary theme-based shows, "tru(E)motion" explores this panorama of human and natural vicissitudes through the conceptual lenses of "Seconds of Life," "Breaking the Edge," and the "Helsinki School."

"Breaking the Edge" features works including slow-motion videos of exploding vases based on 17th-century Dutch still life paintings ("BigBangFilmCover," Ori Gersht, 2006), architectural photographs, and projections of "Night Sites" cut from 16mm film by Oliver Boberg ("Country Road," 2002). While the works in "Breaking the Edge" are mainly formal explorations of the boundary between video and photographic media, the content is perhaps less edgy than the title would have indicated.

Of the art shown in the much-touted, and well-traveled "Helsinki School" exhibition, the most provocative works are those that  push up against the boundaries of the photographic medium. Standouts include Niina Vatanens titillatingly frustrating 2006 series, "The Red Letter (and Other Confessions)," which is comprised of 60 personal letters handwritten by the artist over the course of several years. Using correction fluid, felt-tip markers, and pens, she has rendered the text of these intimate missives illegible. This act of erasure both serves to underscore and obliterate the substantive content enclosed therein, giving the viewer the itchy experience of thwarted voyeurism — a kind of metaphor for photographs themselves.

Using a very different visual language and technique, Noomi Ljundell, in her 2007 "Topography of the Everyday," assigns names to all the objects in an image — excising the objects and leaving only the words. The artist described the project in this way: "The original image has become abstract, floating words, and there are no clear entities in the fragmented image. The viewer needs to read the image word by word, construct the meanings between them and complete the work."

Special exhibitions at the biennale include "Speaking Out Peace" and "Asia Spectrum." While the first exhibition showcases the more traditional photography of luminary Robert Capa, "Asia Spectrum" arranges photographers from Malaysia, China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, around ideas of multi-centricity, hybridity, and the nomadic, in order to represent the ways in which contemporary photographers are deconstructing and reconstructing the world around them.

Highlights from this segment are the deftly crafted, grainy black-and-whites by young Indonesian photographer Agan Harahap, in which contemporary superheroes from films — such as Spiderman, Superman, and the Crow — are seamlessly integrated into old documentary photographs. Angki Purbandono, a big star on the Indonesian scene, "broke the edge" with his "scanography," using scanner technology rather than a conventional camera to craft his images. Another striking set of work is by Malaysian artist Yee Yi-lan, whose "Kinabalu Series" offers lush visuals that move effortlessly between the blurred, dreamlike figure of a pregnant woman, and a crisp, hyper-sharp close up of her long hair, caught in the breeze. Japanese artist Sohei Nishinos montage of close shots of urban scenes add up to striking, surreal cityscapes. Chinese team the Gao Brothers, meanwhile, are presenting their moving performance project, "Twenty People Paid to Hug" (2001).

In addition to the Gao Brothers, Wang Qingsong, Li Wei, Chi Peng, Chen Jiaguang, and Maleonn also are representing China in this exhibition. While the first four have long been well-known on the international contemporary art scene, the work of the latter two has only recently been exhibited in photography shows outside of China, by curators attracted to the technical glitz of works that are otherwise rather conceptually empty, even if they are executed with the savvy of a seasoned fashion photographer.