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Once taboo, now on view: Seoul debuts major queer art exhibition

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Once taboo, now on view: Seoul debuts major queer art exhibition

In Korea, queer culture is still often treated as a social taboo, remaining mostly at the margins of public discourse.

Art Sonje Center in Seoul has opened the first large-scale institutional exhibition in Korea dedicated to queer art, presenting an opportunity to encounter practices and perspectives that have long been overlooked in mainstream cultural spaces.

“Spectrosynthesis Seoul” brings together 74 Korean and international artists across generations and disciplines. Organized in partnership with the Sunpride Foundation, it is the fourth edition of the “Spectrosynthesis” series, following Taipei, Bangkok and Hong Kong presentations.

The Sunpride Foundation was founded by Hong Kong collector Patrick Sun, who has collected art since the 1980s, merging his passion for contemporary art and LGBTQ+ society.

“Queer culture had not been openly visible for a long time,” Kim Sun-jung, artistic director of Art Sonje Center, told The Korea Herald on Monday. “There have been exhibitions that touched on similar themes, but they were rarely presented directly as queer exhibitions.

“But over the past five years, younger artists have begun to approach it in a much more open way — not just as an issue of identity, but almost as something to celebrate.”

The exhibition, she added, was conceived to reflect this shift and to present the changing landscape of queer artistic expression. It includes some 20 works from the Sunpride Foundation’s collection, along with works commissioned by the museum.

In a room washed in red light, two video works unfold side by side.

One is “This Video Is Not a Sign Language Interpretation,” in which deaf queer artist Woo Ji-yang challenges normative forms of expression within sign language, drawing on his own experience.

“Are you planning on getting surgery? Or do you want to be like Harisu (the first openly transgender celebrity in Korea)? … It wears me out, like my individuality is being ignored,” Woo signs in the video, appearing in a drag suit, pointing to the gender bias embedded in the way sign language is delivered.

Next to it is “Dancing Machine,” where Woo is dancing at a gay club, responding not to sound but to the vibration of the speakers — feeling music through the body rather than hearing it. Both works were created in collaboration with artist Yang Seung-wook.

The exhibition is structured in two sections. “The Two-Sided Seashell,” curated by Kim Sun-jung, artistic director of the museum, transforms the entire building into what she describes as a “transitional space,” extending beyond traditional gallery boundaries to include corridors, lobbies and communal areas.

A woman’s restroom on a basement level becomes a virtual theatrical space — artist Koo Ja-hye invites audiences to cross the threshold and move through a landscape of sound and concealed text, encountering what has remained unread or unheard.

Khoo poses a simple but unsettling question: Whose language survives, and which words fail to reach us — and why?

The second section, “Tender: Invisibly Visible, Unlocatably Everywhere,” curated by Lee Yong-woo, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, turns more closely to Korea.

Structured around the themes of memory, place and form, it examines the current landscape of Korean queer art.

It also explores how queer spatiality has emerged in Seoul neighborhoods such as Itaewon, Ikseon-dong and Nakwon-dong — areas where marginalized communities have historically formed networks of visibility and belonging.

Among 21 participating artists at the section are Minki Hong, whose 30-minute video work “Paradise” revisits the history of cruising sites for sexual minorities set against the backdrop of theaters in Jongno, central Seoul.

The exhibition runs through June 28.

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