ASJC Reading List is an online reading group that invites participants to read and study texts discovered during the research process of exhibition preparation. This edition of the Reading List is organized as a part of the public program accompanying the upcoming exhibition Spectrosynthesis Seoul (working title), scheduled to open in March 2026, and will take place over four sessions throughout November. Spectrosynthesis Seoul (working title) is an exhibition centered on the works of queer artists, presenting discourses on the history, archives, and the bodies of the queer community, as well as showcasing their identities and sensibilities. This program aims to explore, through various texts of queer literature and film, the ways in which queer art challenges societal and gender structures and reconstructs identity and sensibility.

*This program will be conducted in Korean only.

Contents

	Date	Title	Speaker	Reading List
1	11. 6.	Rebel Chickens and Growing Sideways ― Reading Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure	Speaker: Jiwon Yu (Curator) Moderator: Heehyun Cho (Head of Exhibitions, Art Sonje Center)	Jack Halberstam (trans. Heo Won), The Queer Art of Failure
2	11. 13.	The Universe of Camp ― Aestheticized Subjects	Speaker: Seo Dongjin (Cultural Critic) Moderator: Nam Woong (Art Critic)	Seoul Queer Archive (trans. Seo Dongjin), Homo Avant Garde
3	11. 20.	Writing as Transition	Speaker: Kim Bi (Writer) Moderator: Hyejin Oh (Literary Critic)	Kim Bi, The Likes of You and Me, Saltwater Baths, Plastic woman
4	11. 27.	On Queer Writing	Speaker: Kim Bong-gon (Novelist) Moderator: Yongwoo Lee (Media and Cultural Historian)	Kim Bong-gon, The Archival

Rebel Chickens and Growing Sideways ― Reading Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure
Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure proposes “low theory” as a way of being and relating otherwise—without falling into cynical resignation or naïve optimism. Traversing avant-garde performance, queer art, and even children’s animation without hierarchy, Halberstam explores alternatives that embrace “failure” in defiance of the myth of positivity and the drive for upward mobility reinforced by heteronormative capitalist society. This seminar will focus on the book’s introduction and first chapter, which offer a queer reading of everyday texts such as the animated film Chicken Run, with its story of rebellious hens, and a penguin documentary, to examine radical interventions to unsettle anthropocentrism and narratives of triumph.

Jiwon Yu (Curator)
Jiwon Yu is a curator, critic, and translator based in Seoul, with an academic background in aesthetics. She was Assistant Curator of the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale and Curator at Leeum Museum of Art. She is currently the co-director of YPC SPACE, an independent program and exhibition venue, and teaches at the Korea National University of Arts and Seoul National University of Science and Technology. Her recent work traverses contemporary Asian art, exploring cultural infrastructures through the lenses of feminism, queer theory, and disability studies, while extending curatorial practice to encompass critical thought on entanglements with nonhuman beings and the production of knowledge through dialogue.

Heehyun Cho (Head of Exhibitions, Art Sonje Center)
Heehyun Cho is a Seoul-based curator. She received an MA in International Cultural Policy and Management after majoring in Curatorial Studies. After working at Korean Cultural Centre UK (2014) and Asia Culture Institute in Gwangju (2015-2016), she is currently the head of exhibitions at Art Sonje Center (2017-), Seoul, where she recently curated and co-curated exhibitions including Adrián Villar Rojas: The Language of the Enemy (2025), Do Ho Suh: Speculations (2024), Rinus Van de Velde: I Want to Eat Mangos in the Bathtub (2024), MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho : Seoul Weather Station (2022), o­ff-site (2023), Dwindles to a Point and Vanishes (2021) and Camille Henro: Saturday, Tuesday (2020).

The Universe of Camp ― Aestheticized Subjects
Films by Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, and perhaps some of Andy Warhol’s works presented the aesthetic sensibilities of sexual minorities, as Susan Sontag famously discussed in her lasting essay on “Camp.” At the same time, their films came to represent the American underground avant-garde cinema. The Seoul Queer Archive, the successor to the Seoul International Queer Film & Video Festival, organized screenings of these works and published the book Homo Avant Garde. Invited to revisit this text, which one barely remembers, we turn our attention to the condition in which queer subjects inevitably find themselves split between two impulses: the desire to claim their place as “normal” citizens by asserting their legitimacy, and the urge to flaunt their “camp” sensibilities, joyfully foregrounding their difference. Furthermore, in a world where signs and symbols have become the principal commodities, we seek to examine how such campy (or flamboyant) performances of identity are consumed and exploited.

Seo Dongjin (Cultural Critic)
Seo Dongjin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Design Intermedia Art at Kaywon University. He has served as Chairman of the Korean Critical Sociological Association, a member of the steering committee for the Korea Artist Prize at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, and an editorial board member of Noon, the journal of the Gwangju Biennale. He has collaborated with institutions including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, the Seoul Museum of Art, and the National Asian Culture Center on exhibitions, projects, performances, and critical writings. His publications include The Non-Aligned Movement Reader (ed., 2020), After the Contemporaneity: Time, Experience, and Image (2018), and The Nap of the Dialectics (2014). Most recently, he participated in the National Asian Culture Center’s exhibition Manifesto of Spring with the work Burning Coal and White Charcoal.

Nam Woong (Art Critic)
He is engaged in visual culture and art criticism, alongside human rights activism. He won the art criticism division of the 4th Platform Culture Criticism Award in 2011 with Discussion of the representation of a homosexual with HIV/AIDS – From the HIV/AIDS crisis to today’s Korean society, and the SeMA-Hana Art Criticism Award 2017 with Art collective today – While we see the present with the eyes of the past, we are still connected as long as there is light for a while. His co-authored works include Infectious Disease and Humanities (2014), Meta-universe: The Generation, Region, Space, and Media of Korean Art in the 2000s (2015), Issue Point of Korea 2017 (2016), and Conversations on Queer Art (2024). He is a standing activist of the Solidarity for LGBT Human Rights of Korea.

Writing as Transition
This project questions the meaning of becoming a “female artist” or a “transgender artist,” focusing on Kim Bi’s early works and her literary trajectory. In particular, it is interested in the overlap between writing and transition, and in the practice of “writing” as a device of transition. It will focus on the scenes in which the identity of “female–transgender–artist” is invented within online communities on PC networks and within institutional literary spaces.

Kim Bi (Writer)
Kim Bi is a writer whose career began in 1997. In 2007, she won a fiction award from the periodical Women’s Donga for her novel Plastic Woman. She has published novels The Girl Called a Bitch (2002), Plastic Woman (2007), The Terminal (2012), Red Exit Signs, Locked Doors, No Way Out (2015), and short story collections The Likes of You and Me (2006), Diet Holic (2009, co-authored). Her essay collections include Kim Bi: The Story of an Ugly Transgender (2001), Wear a Flower in Your Hair (2011), both written individually, as well as Beauty Out of the Mundane (2018), My Mother Bokhee on Jeju Island (2020), co-authored with her partner. Additionally, she translated Lawrence J. Friedman’s The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (2016). She contributed a monthly column titled Onward Sweet Fifties! to The Hankyoreh between 2020 and 2023. She is also the playwright To Die as a Fish (2021/2023).

Hyejin Oh (Literary Critic)
She is a literary critic. Her interest lies in analyzing and historicizing the sexual politics of narrative, representation, and discourse. She published An Extremely Literary Taste (2019) and co-authored Criticism Forum (2025), From Room 19(2023), Birth of a Researcher (2022), Fantasy without the Original (2020), History Has Failed Us, but No Matter (2020), Literatures Destroying Literature (2018), Donkey Ears of the Wolves (2019), Democracy, Testimony, Humanities (2018), Masculinities (2017), Time under the Heaven Tree: Reading Yeom Sang-Seop (2014). She contributed columns to The Hankyoreh, Cine 21, and Pinch. She teaches literary criticism and cultural theory at the university level.

Queer Writing
Focusing on Kim Bong-gon’s latest short story, The Archival (2023), this session will explore how the very act of ‘archiving’ the multitude of moments and emotions that constitute an individual life possesses the power to reconstruct queer narratives. Writer Kim Bong-gon is recognized as a significant voice who offers profound and perceptive responses to the question of what ‘queer writing’ can be in the contemporary era.

Kim Bong-gon (Writer)
Kim Bong-gon is a novelist renowned for capturing the daily lives and inner worlds of Korean gay men with concrete and nuanced language. His literary universe transcends the realms of social discourse or identity politics, exemplifying an auto-ethnographic mode of writing that reduces the queer narrative to the life and affect of an individual per se. He meticulously records the private yet universal human experiences—love, desire, solitude, memory, loss—that are often marginalized within grand narratives, building them from the most minute units of literature. Through this practice, he sustains a literary project that invokes ‘queer’ not as a category, but as a concrete, lived reality.

Yongwoo Lee (Media historian and cultural studies scholar | Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Yongwoo Lee is a media historian and cultural studies scholar. He is a curator and assistant professor of cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He focuses on critical media and cultural studies of modern and contemporary Korea, East Asian popular culture, visual studies, Asian contemporary art, exhibition & curatorial studies, popular culture in East Asia, intellectual history of postwar Japan and Korea, postcolonial memory.