Sonje Center presents a series of talk program in conjunction with the exhibition Spectrosynthesis Seoul, bringing together not only participating artists but also sociologists, literary critics, and art historians. By bringing perspectives from diverse fields into dialogue, these programs expand the exhibition’s discourse in a more layered way, while sharing the insights of artists and researchers, activating the museum as a space for dialogue.

Program Schedule

About the program

The Conditions of Korean Queer Art
– Date and Time: Sat, May 16, 2026, 15:00–18:00
– Venue: Art Sonje Center
– Co-organized by Korean Association for LGBTQ+ and Queer Studies
– Speakers:  Yeomyeong Kim (Curator), Nam Woong (Art Critic), Yang Seungwook (Artist), siren eun young jung (Artist)
– Moderator: Yeon Hye-Won (Researcher)
– Language: Korean Only
– Description: This roundtable examines the conditions and constraints under which Korean queer art is produced, exhibited, and critically engaged in Korea, within a broader cultural context that often frames South Korea as a “Global nation.” This image of Korea as a global cultural producer tends to generate expectations of a society grounded in liberal values and inclusivity. However, in practice, queer art in Korea has been shaped by a range of limitations, including the nature of exhibition spaces, the criteria of public funding systems, practices of censorship and self-censorship, and the limitations of critical language.
Rather than remaining at the level of abstract theorization, this program focuses on the concrete processes through which artworks are presented—how they are exhibited, what aspects are modified or removed, and in what contexts they are translated or excluded. Through this, the roundtable seeks to reveal the actual conditions and contemporary realities that shape queer art in Korea—conditions that are often obscured by the image of “Global Korea.”

Yeomyeong Kim (Curator)
Yeomyeong Kim is a researcher and curator who interrogates the structural conditions of visibility for marginalized narratives. Kim’s work focuses on the friction between institutional systems and queer artistic practices, tracing how social constraints and administrative criteria shape the production of contemporary art. Through investigative curating and critical writing, Kim continues to document the “untranslatable” contexts of the Korean queer scene and seeks to expand the discursive territory where these voices can be authentically heard.

Nam Woong (Art Critic)
Nam Woong 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.

Yang Seungwook (Artist)
Yang Seungwook has used memory, personal archives, and the emotional reverberations of everyday objects as a basis for expanding long-term projects and complex forms of practice combining photography with installation art. The artist’s work explores the emotional temporality of objects and the traces left by relationships through a repeated process of circulating, donating, and exchanging playthings, objects, and images. Focusing in particular on the sensory transformations that permeated photography, objects, and relationships, he uses queerness as a basis for tracing the invisible topographies of emotions that occupy images and items. Yang’s work combines sculptural installations with photography, text, publishing, and participatory acts as it shows the entanglements between individual memory and collective perception.

siren eun young jung (Artist)
siren eun young jung is an artist based in Seoul. Her practice, centered on video and performance, explores political actions in art through feminist-queer perspectives. Her major projects, such as the Dongducheon Project (2007–2009) and the Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008–present), focus on dismantling hegemonic narratives and reconstructing the archives and memories of marginalized communities.

Yeon Hye-Won (Researcher)
Yeon Hye-Won is a sociological researcher, writer as well as an activist with ‘Hiddenbag’, an organization resisting academic credentialism and elitism. Her work explores knowledge that unsettles norms, the instability of citizenship, and the possibilities of engaging queerness at local and micro scales. Moving across writing, performance, exhibitions, and publishing, she develops practices that traverse and blur disciplinary boundaries. Her publications include the collaboratively conceived and authored Queer-idology and the play A Revenge Note for the Margins. She is the publisher of the queer art magazine them and a member of the ‘Korean Queer Theatre Archive’. Crossing the boundaries between research, activism, and art, her work brings text and practice into a dynamic relationship in which each propels the other forward.

Korean Association for LGBTQ+ and Queer Studies
The Queer Graduate Student and Early Career Researcher Network (Seong-Yeon-Net), established in December 2019, officially transitioned into the Korean Association for LGBTQ+ and Queer Studies following its inauguration ceremony on July 11, 2025.The Korean Association for LGBTQ+ and Queer Studies is an academic community of researchers dedicated to the advancement of LGBTQ+/Queer studies. Researchers from diverse academic fields engage in close exchange centered on their shared scholarly interest in LGBTQ+/Queer studies, striving for the qualitative deepening and quantitative expansion of the field. The association is open to all researchers interested in LGBTQ+/Queer studies. By actively leveraging the diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds of its members, it pursues academic dialogue and research collaboration that transcend disciplinary boundaries. In doing so, it builds a research community for the development of LGBTQ+/Queer studies and plays a leading role in creating new academic discourses.

Looking Out for Blind Spots
– Date and Time: Thu, May 21, 2026, 18:00–19:30
– Venue: Art Sonje Center
– Speaker: Inhwan Oh (Artist)
– Language: Korean Only
– Description: In 2014, Inhwan Oh defined his artistic practice “as a cultural blind spot,”, distinguishing it from art as an expression of the autonomous subject. His practice explores alternative realms where othered lives and desires—those not permitted within dominant culture—can be realized.
This artist talk revisits the diverse projects he has developed over the past 30 years through the lens of “looking out for cultural blind spots,” examining how his work has engaged with marginalized sensibilities and the possibilities of alternative ways of living.

Inhwan Oh (Artist)
Inhwan Oh engages in multilayered explorations of everyday spaces, social systems, and human identity. He uses ordinary items and actions as media to reconstruct relationships of individuals, groups, bodies, and language across the boundaries of social norms and art. Through creations that span media such as photography, video, installation, and performance, the artist engages in ongoing reflections of the effects that power structures, memory, and social norms have on human actions and emotions. He also looks beyond issues of specific communities to reflect on the instability of human existence and the complexity of social relationships. With his use of evanescent materials such as incense, smoke, and ash, his work visualizes time, disappearance, and the transformation of emotions through artistic acts that reveal the unseen.

Archiving the Hole: Archives of the Queer Community’s Body and Affect
– Date and Time: Thu, May 28, 2026, 18:00–19:30
– Venue: Art Sonje Center
– Speakers: Dae Hyun Kim (Historian), Minyoung Park (Artist / Full-time Activist at Chingusai)
– Moderator: Hyejin Oh (Literary Critic)
– Language: Korean Only
– Description:  The “newsletters” consistently produced by queer human rights organizations function both as archives that accumulate queer affect.
This talk examines the political and aesthetic significance of recording the bodies and histories of minorities through the keywords “queer,” “human rights movement,” “community,” and “archive.”
Composed of diverse materials—including oral interviews, texts, photographs, and videos—this archive forms the foundation for the concrete and physical body of the queer community.

Dae Hyun Kim (Historian)
Daehyun Kim is a Research Professor at the Institute for Global Korean Studies at Yonsei University. He also serves as a member of the Planning and Operations Committee at the Institution for the Right To Found Family and is a member of the Newsletter Team at Korean Gay Men’s Human Rights Group Chingusai. His research focuses on the formation of gender and sexuality stigmas in modern Korea, as well as the associated knowledge systems and institutions. He has (co-)authored several books, including Impunity (2022, co-author), Between the World and Seclusion (2021), and Fantasy Without an Original (2020, co-author). For the special exhibition Practicing Flow, he served as a co-curator, overseeing the collection, selection, and cataloging of articles from the Chingusai newsletter.

Minyoung Park (Artist / Full-time Activist at Chingusai)
Minyoung Park reconstructs the history and sensibility of the LGBTQ+ community by using as artistic media the newsletters of Chodonghoe, the first homosexual rights organization formed by Koreans, and its successor, Chingusai. Addressing the fact that minority histories were not unrecorded but recorded without being granted a public position, Park rereads the newsletters as a formative and affective archive. In fact, for him a newsletter is both an archival record and a sensory document that condenses the language, typefaces, and images a community has created for itself. By translating this material into artistic form, Park creates a conduit through which the collective sensibility of the LGBTQ+ community can cross over to audiences of another time. Making research and collaboration central to his work, Minyoung Park rearranges and interprets materials together with activists, designers, and historians, exploring how queer art can connect with historical practice.

Hyejin Oh (Literary Critic)
Hyejin Oh 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),