"Svetlana Khorkina, Gymnast, 5'5", 105 pounds." This is a label written underneath a life-sized photo of the Russian Olympic gold-medalist, presented in a line of dozens of other athletes along the wall of a gallery at the Gwangju Biennale exhibition hall in South Korea. Their bodies, all clad in generic black underwear, are short, tall, slender, and bulky, tailored specifically to their respective sports, with their daily exercise and diet regimens listed underneath.

The telling title of this mural is "Athletic Body Design," an installation that falls under the "Unnamed" design category of the fourth Gwangju Design Biennale, which launches officially tomorrow. The idea of "Unnamed" design was coined by artist and political activist Ai Weiwei who, last year, was appointed artistic co-director of the fete, opposite Korean architect H-Sang Seung. Alongside the classical components of design, that is, art, architecture, graphic design, and fashion — traditional, or "Named" design — Ai envisioned an arsenal of exhibitions that explored forms of creativity outside of these traditional categories, including, as the mural indicates, how people relate to their own bodies.

During Ai's detention by the Chinese government earlier this year, Brendan McGetrick, a Beijing-based (Rhode Island-born) writer who edited Ai's 2008 book, "Becoming: Images of the Building of the Beijing's Air Terminal 3," was the curator tasked with carrying these ideas out. The result is a series of exploratory installations that address a different set of questions than design traditionally does — questions of health care, economics, ecology, and politics.

In one corner of the gallery, for instance, there's an entire exhibit based on a demonstration pamphlet written by Egyptian protesters in Cairo. Other installations include a look at the parts within the iPhone and the factories in which they're produced (mostly in Korea); the anatomy of a scent; the features that define beauty in the human face; and the genomes of genetically modified rice. Before the official opening of the biennial, ARTINFO sat down with McGetrick to discuss putting together the event without Ai Weiwei, the definition of design, and why this festival could only happen in the East.

How did you come about becoming a curator here?

I'm not really a curator. I'm actually mostly a writer and editor. The way I got involved is that Weiwei invited me. We had worked together in the past, and I had wrote something for his exhibition in London at the Tate, and we were talking right around that time, right around the time he was appointed as director, and he just sort of said, "Why not?"

What was it like carrying out his ideas while he was noticeably absent?

He totally disappeared. We didn't know anything about where he was. It was upsetting personally, but in terms of the show, professionally, it was fine. We had talked in depth at the beginning, and after that it was just a matter of developing the ideas. We would talk, but it's not like he was really overseeing it. He played an extremely important role in that he set the thing in motion, and he had the original idea. And that's really everything.

How were you assigned the "Unnamed" portion of the biennale?

Basically when H-Sang and Weiwei came up with this concept, they sort of agreed H-Sang would do the "Named" part and Weiwei would do the "Unnamed" part — and Weiwei appointed me, and that was it. As directors they were dealing with a whole different strata of issues, and we were just doing the curatorial.

What was your selection criteria for "Unnamed" design?

The good thing about "Unnamed" design is that it's anything. The main thing that we chose to do is not look at any design magazines or any design blogs, just totally reject that whole world and instead look at politics, science — things that we thought were interesting and creative, but were just not necessarily aesthetically driven. I really like this genetically modified rice installation we have. I think that's really design — genetic modification. We had such larger ambitions at the beginning. We wanted to have this macaque who was genetically modified to glow in the dark so we wanted to have an incubator with the macaque, but you can't do that. You can't do anything with animals. Rice was the best we could get.

During panel discussions, a lot of speakers were debating whom expanding the definition of design really benefits.

It doesn't benefit the designers or the people who take it as their job to tell you what design is. It's not a more generous way to look at things, just a more fair way to look at things. I don't know if it benefits anybody, except that to me it's just a more relevant, fair way of looking at design.

Does that make everybody a designer? And if so, does that destroy the definition of what a designer is?

Potentially. It's not even about that though. That's definitely not the agenda to say that. Our goal was just that when people leave the show, they notice things, and think about things as design that they hadn't before. And that definitely potentially includes everybody. Every time you carefully consider what your options are and choose a solution that's efficient and effective — that's design for me. Maybe that makes everybody a designer, but what we're saying is that there are a lot more things that are design and should be considered design than there are.

The idea of going "Unnamed" has also brought up the concept of anonymity in design, or the death of the author.

The name thing is not interesting to me. People make this big deal about names. Earlier, a panel asked a very big-named designer how it feels to be in the "Unnamed" section. He's an established, very good designer, and that's not what we're doing. What he did was, with his name and his talent, made this phenomenon that we consider "Unnamed" design. That kind of authorship — people should be recognized for what they do. It's not that I think that everyone should be generic and its all like Economist articles, which have no bylines. But the oppressive weight of some names in design is stupid. Fame and reputation allow you to get whatever you want. I'm not sure that's a good situation.

So do you find a lot of people are misconceiving the concept here?

I don't mind that at all. You're never going to purely communicate to someone.

Do you find this biennale is very different than one that could happen in Europe?

The beauty of being in Asia is that a concept like design is much less claustrophobic than in the West, where everyone has an idea of what design is. I thought it was an enormous opportunity, that this was an ambiguous concept floating in people's minds, and you could sort of fill it in with much more interesting things than chairs and tee shirts. That, I totally agree with. Of course, this kind of thing could technically happen in the West. But a large part of what we did here came from the freedom offered by the Biennale Foundation. With every few exceptions, they didn't dictate anything. They said, "Do your best. Here's money to do it."

That's a huge difference in terms of what state sponsorship means. It is really important you don't have those obligations. There are other issues that arise, like political sensitivities, but there's a lot less garbage than if large corporations were here. In the States, it's totally impossible to do anything outside the private sector. The biennale is Asian in the sense that they have governments who have money. That did affect the outcome and allowed the event to be a little less commercial and potentially a little more offensive. I think that's really good.