Since the financial crisis of the late 1990s, Korean society has accorded considerably less space to the discourse on democracy. In the realms of sex and gender, however, the debate is sharper, more experimental and more practically oriented than ever. Not only women and sexual minorities but even men are actively asserting their own rights and claiming their own spaces. The absence of fathers, the revival of matriarchal society and the crisis of masculinity have all become fashionable terms. TV comedy programs have begun featuring regular sections with titles such as “The Male News” and “The Committee for the Restoration of Male Human Rights,” satirizing the reverse discrimination suffered by men. Members of the group NamseongYeondae (Solidarity for Men) have demonstrated in the streets, calling for an end to discrimination against men, while some men have begun arguing that women should also have to do compulsory military service.

A Room of His Own takes as its starting point these ironic phenomena that are now appearing in Korea, regarded by many as the epitome of a patriarchal society. Participation in it, however, has not been limited to Korean artists but expanded to artists from countries in the Middle East, including Iraq, Israel, Turkey and Afghanistan in order to consider convergences and conjoinings of discourses of gender across framings of geographically bounded regions or area-studies divisions. By juxtaposing works by artists from Korea and the Middle East, this show expects to stimulate a variety of discussions on masculinities which have been at the peripheries of the academic and artistic discourses of gender in both regions. In addition, this juxtaposition will help measure how culturally specific both Korean and Middle Eastern discourses on masculinities have become.

As its title, borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s 1929 book A Room of One’s Own suggests, this exhibition is premised on the fact that the discourses on masculinities rely to a considerable extent on the achievements of feminisms. The male, female, gay and lesbian artists taking part in it, regardless of their own sexual identities, are focusing more on men as social beings than as sexual beings, and on masculinity as a political arena. Their works aim to explore ways in which the discourse of masculinities can engage with that of femininities and with interest in women’s rights.