Art Sonje Center presents a series of talk programs in conjunction with the exhibition Spectrosynthesis Seoul. Featuring participating artists alongside sociologists, literary critics, and art historians, the programs bring together perspectives from diverse fields to expand the discourse of the exhibition. Through conversations with artists and researchers, the series activates the museum as a space for reflection, exchange, and dialogue.

Program Schedule

About the program

Two Examples of Queering
– Dates: Thursday, June 11 18:00
– Speaker: Ryeom Kim (Artist), Woosung Lee (Artist)
– Moderator: Hyosil Yang (Aesthetician)
– Language: Korean Only
– Description: “When, and in what ways, am I queer as an artist?” This talk considers the question through the long-standing dichotomy of composition and form. It further explores the gaps and possibilities  between queer life and queer visual composition, as well as the sensibilities and practices that move across lines of flight.

Ryeom Kim (Artist)
Ryeom Kim traces the residues of queer subculture through paintings set in the backstreets of Itaewon and Jongno. Rather than pursuing monumental restoration, he focuses on ephemera—sweat, hangovers, gossip, and other fleeting traces—to explore what has remained invisible within dominant narratives. Figures whose faces are obscured or turned away resist objectifying gazes and enact a “right to opacity,” while his paintings record the loneliness and melancholia that remain after the spectacle has faded.

Woosung Lee (Artist)
Woosung Lee translates narratives drawn from personal experience and observations of everyday landscapes into painting. He focuses on moments when familiar places, such as streets or homes, suddenly feel unfamiliar. When memory, affection, or the energy of human presence changes the way a space is perceived, he transforms those sensations into images. Capturing moments when individuals gather and drift apart, Lee reveals a quiet brilliance within everyday life.

Hyosil Yang (Aesthetician)
Hyosil Yang received her Ph.D. in Aesthetics from Seoul National University with a dissertation “On Baudelaire’s Modernity”. Currently lecturing at Seoul National University and Dankook University, her research focuses on the aesthetic and ethical plurality in representing marginalized groups, including women, youth, and the LGBTQ+ community. She is the author of The Imaginative Against Power: A Chronicle of Cultural Movement (2017) and A Disabled Life, Words of Love (2017). A prominent scholar in gender and ethical studies, she has also translated Judith Butler’s seminal works into Korean, including Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2008) and Giving an Account of Oneself: A Critique of Ethical Violence (2013).

Porous Opacity in Queer Performance
– Dates: Thursday, June 18 18:00
– Speaker: Ru Kim (Artist), Lee Dong-hyun (Artist)
– Moderator: Soo Ryon Yoon (NRF Research Professor, Institute for East Asian Studies, Sungkonghoe University)
– Language: Korean Only
– Description: Through live performances that combine bodily movement, electronic music, and moving image collaborations, Lee Dong-hyun and Ru Kim explore the contradictory relationship between the power and vulnerability of gendered and racialized bodies. This talk examines the tensions, exchanges of gaze, and shared affective responses that emerge between performer and audience, asking: What do audiences expect from queer performance, and what does queer performance ask of its audience? These performative interactions unsettle established relations between performer, audience, and exhibition space through the liveness of queer performance, reshaping the conditions of artistic experience itself. The artists’ own appearances within their performances are also significant. Their interiority may be concealed—through Ru Kim’s face painting or the spherical forms in Lee Dong-hyun’s works that recall mascot costumes—yet it is also shared through porous channels that resist complete visibility or formalization: openings on surfaces, whispered monologues, asides, and fragmented voices. Focusing on the artists’ recent works, this talk explores the porousness and opacity of queer performance, and considers how performance functions in each artist’s practice as both a methodology and a visual apparatus.

Ru Kim (Artist)
Ru Kim draws on experiences of living across Germany, Cyprus, Canada, Korea and Brazil as a foundation for their practice. Their work interrogates violence embedded within structures such as patriarchy, imperialism, and colonialism, while exploring modes of resistance. In recent projects, Kim has turned toward imagining stories from non-human perspectives, re-examining familiar structures of power and opening possibilities for different forms of connection and coexistence.

Lee Dong-hyun (Artist)
Lee Dong-hyun transforms sensations and memories that resist language into material form through the body. Viewing the body as a site where memory is inscribed and gazes intersect, he explores how internal sensations connect with external space through localized points such as openings and bodily fragments. Working across drawing, performance, sculpture, and video, he reconfigures the boundaries between body, space, and perception.

Soo Ryon Yoon (NRF Research Professor, Institute for East Asian Studies, Sungkonghoe University)
Soo Ryon Yoon is a NRF research professor at the Institute for East Asian Studies, Sungkonghoe University. Her research focuses on race, inter-Asia, and performance. Her writings have appeared  in positions: asia critique, Dance Chronicle, Performance Research, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, GPS: Global Performance Studies, among others. Her edited and collaborative publications include Inter-Asia in Motion: Dance as Method, Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia, Realisms in East Asian Performance, and the East Asia section of the Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism Research Collective. 

Imagining the Flesh-side(Sal-gyeot)
– Dates: Thursday, June 25 18:00
– Speaker: Jeong-ui Yun (Artist), Ho Hur (Artist)
– Moderator: Sang Hyun Ha (Curatorial Assistant, Art Sonje Center)
– Language: Korean Only
– Description: Within the private space of the studio, Jeong-ui Yun explores the sensual ways of looking at the body and fragmented sculptural forms that transform over time. Ho Hur is interested in spaces where people gather outside normative communities, translating the sexual and emotional experiences found there into the flesh-like surfaces(sal-gyeol) of his paintings. Through flesh that is cut, ruptured, intertwined, or brought into contact, the two artists imagine the self and the other, as well as relationships and forms of community. Their imagination of others is not idealized; instead, it appears in ways that are somehow “queer”—wounding one another, only to return to their solitary spaces. This talk examines how desire directed toward particular bodies and others is transformed into the materiality of sculpture and painting, while considering how relationships with the “other” are imagined from the most fundamental unit—“a piece of flesh”—and  where such relationships begin to fail.

Jeong-ui Yun (Artist)
Jeong-ui Yun regards his own body as a framework for producing sculpture and explores a sculptural methods that reconfigure the visual and tactile perception through the mediation of a model’s body. By revealing differentiated perspectives and bodily traces throughout the process, he presents sculpture not as a completed form but as an ongoing process where multiple conditions intersect.

Ho Hur (Artist)
Ho Hur explores how people meet, connect briefly, and part in the less visible places of the city. Rooted in personal experiences, his work examines how moments of recognition form between strangers and reveals the recurring structures of loneliness and the desire for connection that shape urban life.