Art Sonje Center presents a series of talk programmes 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 programmes 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.

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About the program

1. B, BB, 3B, 4B, 5B…, Political Landscape in a Curious Raven
 – Date and Time: March 20, 2026 at 12:00
 – Venue: Art Sonje Center(In-Person)
 – Speaker: Min Yoon (Artist), Au Sow Yee (Artist)
– Language: Korean (Min Yoon); English (Au Sow Yee, with Korean consecutive interpretation)
 – Description: This program will be conducted in a relay talk format, where two artists present their respective practices within a 90-minute session. Min Yoon is currently based in Vienna and has engaged in the conditions and structures surrounding art and productivity through various media, including drawing, painting, and sculpture. In this artist talk, he will introduce his works—composed of fundamental art materials, responding to children’s books that have been restricted or banned in schools and libraries in South Korea and the United States—alongside his early exhibition Boys Be (2013), which shares a cohesive context. Furthermore, He will present Working Title: My Real Online Viewing Room (2025), a documentation of his studio situation during the production of his latest works. Au Sow Yee’s artist talk revolves around the transformation of hidden “landscapes” in and around the Malay Archipelago, seen through the stories and journeys of a “curious raven,” a messenger between worlds. It further explores the context and form of the exhibiting work, reflecting on the influential traces of colonization, shifts in identity politics, and the power play between inclusion and exclusion, insider and outsider. Through this, the talk examines the theatrical spectrum of the nation-state and its underlying undercurrents.

Min Yoon (Artist)
Currently based in Vienna, explores the structures surrounding art and productivity through drawing, painting, and sculpture. Incorporating the roles and expectations placed upon artists and the conditions of creative labor, his work questions familiar notions of authorship and originality. By juxtaposing everyday materials with institutional language, Yoon reveals the conditions in which art is situated while subtly shifting them to invite renewed reflection.

Au Sow Yee (Artist)
Currently based in Taipei.  Creates temporal and spatial montages through video, installation, and theatrical devices. Exploring how images and their means of production relate to history, politics, and power, she questions how memory and narrative are formed and transformed across colonialism, the Cold War, and nation formation, focusing on how marginalized presences may be rewoven into new stories.

2. 4+1 Stories
 – Date and Time: March 20, 2026 at 14:00
 – Venue: Art Sonje Center(In-Person)
 – Speaker: LEE Mingwei (Artist), Jongwoo Jeremy Kim (Professor of Critical Theory and Art History at Carnegie Mellon University)
– Language: English (with Korean consecutive interpretation)
 – Description: LEE Mingwei’s participatory works and performances turn everyday gestures—mending, sweeping, and singing—into quiet invitations to trust, attention, and care. In this talk, LEE will share his practice—from early projects such as Money for Art to his iconic works The Mending Project, Our Labyrinth, and Sonic Blossom. LEE will be joined for a conversation by Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, PhD, Professor of Critical Theory and Art History at Carnegie Mellon University. The program will conclude with an open audience Q&A.

LEE Mingwei (Artist)
Born in Taiwan and currently lives and works between Paris, New York, and Taipei. His participatory art installations explore the dynamics of human relationships, focusing on themes of trust between strangers, intimacy, and self-awareness. By proposing simple day-to-day activities—such as eating, sleeping, writing, or conversing—in one-on-one encounters, LEE transforms ordinary gestures into situations that prompt reflection on existing relationships and the formation of new connections with unfamiliar individuals. While his projects offer expansive possibilities for everyday interaction, they continue to evolve through viewers’ participation over the course of an exhibition. LEE received his MFA from Yale University and has held solo exhibitions at the Mori Art Museum (2014), Gropius Bau (2020), and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco | de Young (2024).

Jongwoo Jeremy Kim(Professor of Critical Theory and Art History at Carnegie)
A renowned historian of modern and contemporary art, he earned his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 2007. Dr. Kim has authored several books, including Painted Men in Britain (Ashgate, 2012; Routledge, 2016) and Male Bodies Unmade (University of California Press, 2023). His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in leading scholarly journals such as Art History and positions: asia critique. Kim’s research encompasses Aubrey Beardsley, Jean Cocteau, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Robert Gober, Kenneth Tam, Young-joo Byun, Inhwan Oh, siren eun young jung, and Kang Seung Lee. As a 2026 Clark Fellow, Dr. Kim will work on the manuscript for his fourth book, Korean Accents, Asian Accents: Queer Art Across the Pacific, at the Clark Art Institute this fall.

3. ‘Tender: Invisibly Visible Unlocatably Everywhere’ Talk Series: The Queer Politics of Vulnerability and Solidarity
 – Date and Time: March 20, 2026 at 16:00
 – Venue: Art Sonje Center(In-Person)
 – Speaker: Jaewon Kim (Artist), Ibanjiha (Artist), Yongwoo Lee (Curator/Professor, Chinese University of Hong Kong)
 – Language: Korean Only
 – Description: Conceptualized through José Esteban Muñoz’s queer futurity and Beatrice von Bismarck’s concept of “transposition,” Tender: Invisibly Visible Unlocatably Everywhere illuminates how contemporary Korean queer art cultivates spaces of memory and intimacy outside official narratives. This talk brings together two artists working across the realms of queer archives and the social body: Jaewon Kim and Ibanjiha. Ibanjiha constructs an “archive of survival” through Staying Alive Here in South Korea 2025, a large-scale history painting addressing martial law and resistance that visualizes the narratives of marginalized subjects. Jaewon Kim’s Trace-bearing Beings and Body Temperature explore the complex desires of queer communities and the sensory structures of biopolitics through cruising and HIV/AIDS discourse. This talk considers how their practices constitute queer temporalities and relationalities, and the politics of vulnerability and solidarity that emerge in the process.

Jaewon Kim (Artist)
Explores the intersections of visibility, memory, and entangled temporality through video, photography, and writing. In the social and affective contexts surrounding queerness and HIV/AIDS, his work gathers and rearranges the residues left after infection and the layers of invisible relationships, expanding personal experience toward the lives of others.

Ibanjiha (Artist)
Works across themes of patriarchy, queerness, gender, and media. The name combines iban (sexual minority) and banjiha (semi-basement), reflecting the precarious space where the artist’s queer and creative identity took shape. Since 2004, Ibanjiha has produced work across painting, drawing, animation, publishing, and YouTube, developing a distinctive queer aesthetic that creates ruptures within a gender-binary order.

Yongwoo Lee (Curator/Professor, 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.

4. Gauging and Misalignment: Body, Affect, and the Conditions of Judgment
 – Date and Time: March 28, 2026 at 16:00
 – Venue: Art Sonje Center(In-Person)
 – Speaker: Muyeong Kim (Artist), Jimin Hah (Artist), Yeong Ran Kim (Performance Researcher)
– Language: Korean Only
 – Description: The judgment in sports and the diagnosis in medicine measure and categorize the body, establishing boundaries between the possible and the impossible. Jimin Hah’s Felt out of joint as a girl follows the bodies and experiences of trans athletes, who are gauged and judged through the language of tests, metrics, and regulations in sports. Muyeong Kim’s Bedridden implements a bed structure modeled after a kennel as an installation, sensorially evoking the diagnosis of illness and the accompanying modes of protection and surveillance. This talk traces the subtle “misalignments” that occur at the moments of gauging revealed in these two works. It discusses how the body and affect are produced and situated within conditions of judgment, and explores what modes of sensing and relations emerge in those gaps.

Muyeong Kim (Artist)
Examines correspondences between opposing thought and desire as mediated through structural configurations. He has repeatedly employed devices such as boxes, stages, and cameras to investigate the construction of scenes and the positioning of bodies within them. In his recent work with handcrafted staging apparatuses, Kim analyzes the subtle fissures between the aesthetic consumption of suffering and willed passivity. His practice reveals how boundaries form within such structures and prompts reflection on the conditions under which we linger and persevere.

Jimin Hah (Artist)
Working in the fields of video and performance, they have turned their attention to bodies that possess both dissonance and movement. The verb “move” encompasses multilayered states of dynamism, discipline, and resistance. In the artist’s view, subjects in our ever-shifting contemporary environment come to possess a dynamic state through their encounters with spiritual and physical dissonance. The state of moving through one’s own path—while creating rifts with our assigned body—is interpreted at multiple layers from a gender standpoint, appearing as different courses within the artwork’s narrative.

Yeong Ran Kim (Performance Researcher)
A researcher and cultural practitioner exploring distinctive moments of encounter woven through aesthetic practices. Grounded in trans/queer cultural studies, their interdisciplinary work spans performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, and media theory. They connect artistic practice and theoretical inquiry through collaborations with artists, writing, and teaching. They currently teach and conduct research at Ewha Womans University.