Art Sonje Center presents a series of talks in conjunction with the exhibition Verticals. Examining diverse perspectives on verticality, the exhibition considers sculpture through women’s and queer perspectives. Bringing together participating artists, curators, and researchers whose work engages with sculpture, sexuality, desire, and architecture, the talk series invites us to rethink the forms and meanings of “verticality” in contemporary life.

About the program

‘Trans*Architectures’
– Date: Sunday, Nov 1, 14:00–16:00
– Venue: Art Sonje Center, 2F Meeting Room
– Speaker: Lee Dami Dammy (Artist), Woojin Jeon (Artist), Choi Goen (Artist)
– Moderator: QF (Kim Malgeum, Ha Sang Hyun) (Curator)
– Description: Verticality in architecture begins with basic elements such as the column and has long served as a metaphor for monumentality and authority. The spaces shaped by this vertical order, then, can hardly be considered neutral; they may also be understood as presupposing particular bodies and gender norms. Drawing on the concept of “Trans*Architectures,” this talk asks how sculpture might offer new ways of seeing and experiencing space. Participating artists, Lee Dami Dammy, Woojin Jeon, Choi Goen join the conversation to discuss their previous works and share how they have interpreted the spaces of Art Sonje Center and developed their works in response to it. 

Lee Dami Dammy (Artist)
Dammy Dami Lee is an architect, designer, and artist. She is also the principal of Flora and Fauna, an architectural practice based in Seoul and on the internet. Through plants, animals, objects, and buildings, she speculates on material modes of existence that animate space and relationships, as well as on the possibilities of architectural images. Her work reconsiders the architectural landscape through the lenses of new nature, gender, and ornament. She was named a 2025 TSK Teaching Fellow. She is also a founding member of the curatorial collective Yeo-jip-hap and co-authored Building Role Models: Women Talk Architecture (2018), and participated in group exhibitions at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, Korean Pavilion (2025, Venice), MMCA (2023, Gwacheon).

Woojin Jeon (Artist)
Woojin Jeon works with sculptural installations, bringing domestic objects into contact with industrial materials to take a whimsical approach to the disquiet embedded in everyday life. Having lived between South Korea and the UK, he is interested in how the conditions under which something is perceived as transgressive can shift across different social and institutional contexts. His work disrupts established relationships between objects, spaces and utilities. Jeon examines the arbitrary boundaries between danger and safety, hygiene and contamination, and intimacy and discomfort. Jeon has held solo exhibitions at Post Territory Ujeongguk (2020) and Gallery 175 (2019). He has also taken part in group exhibitions at the Art Sonje Center (2026, Seoul), KCCUK (2025, London).

Choi Goen (Artist)
Choi Goen cuts, bends, and rearranges objects that often go unnoticed or are relegated to the margins, such as furniture, household appliances, and building fixtures and equipment. The objects in her work are also domestic objects that perform invisible forms of labor. Through mass-produced objects, Choi explores the social codes of an era that shape the members of society, while investigating the sculptural possibilities of transforming standardized systems and orders. Choi has held solo exhibitions at Amado Art Space (2022), P21 (2021), Audio Visual Pavilion (2018), and Kim Chong Yung Museum (2016). She has also taken part in group exhibitions at the 61st Venice Biennale, Korean Pavilion(2026, Venice), the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale (2024, Changwon. In 2024, she received the Frieze Seoul Artist Award.

Plural Verticalities
– Date: Sunday, Nov 22, 14:00–16:00
– Venue: Art Sonje Center, 2F Meeting Room 
– Speaker: Noh Haena (Curator, ARKO Art Center), Lee Yeonsook (Rita, Art Critic), Yoonseok Lee (Architect), QF (Kim Malgeum, Ha Sang Hyun) (Curator)
– Description: No Haena, who curated Sculpture Journey: Up to Today (2022, WESS), considers sculpture as a symbolic form that embodies the experiences of women sculptors. Critic Lee Yeonsook (a.k.a. Rita) examines how minor and minoritarian perspectives take shape in contemporary sculpture. Lee Yoonseok explores personal and structural dissonance through space and considers how architecture might open up alternative possibilities. Kim Malgeum and Ha Sang Hyun, curators of Verticals, share questions and reflections during the development of the exhibition. Together with the three researchers, they discuss verticality in contemporary sculpture and architecture from a range of perspectives. The research texts developed in conjunction with the program will be published in the exhibition catalogue.

Noh Haena (Curator)
Noh Haena is a curator at ARKO Art Center. Noh approaches exhibitions and programs as mediums through which artists, collaborators, and participants bring their own experiences into relation, believing in the potential of their coming together to generate unforeseen events. At ARKO Art Center, she has curated The Art of Learning: Becoming Each Other’s School (2026), Anti-Self: Undoing Oneself (2025), Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone (2024), Noh Won-hee: You Were There (2023), and The Fable of Net in Earth (2022). She received the Exhibition Curation Award at the 19th Monthly Art Grand Prize in 2022 for Sculpture Journey: Up to Today, presented at WESS.

Lee Yeonsook (Rita, Art Critic)
Lee Yeonsook a.k.a. Rita is a writer and critic based in Seoul, South Korea. They write about popular culture and visual art with an interest in the modes of existence of minorities. As a member of the curatorial and publishing collective ‘Agrafa Society’, they co-published the webzine Seminar. Under the name ‘OFF’, they co-organized feminist lectures and criticism projects. They run a blog (http://blog.naver.com/hotleve). They received the CritiqueM Comics Criticism Prize in 2015 and the SeMA-HANA Art Criticism Prize in 2021. Their publications include The Advancing of Lowlifes, Only Possible Here, Dad Novel, and Dialogue on Contemporary Korean Queer Art (co-authored).

Yoonseok Lee (Architect)
Yoonseok Lee works on almost anything related to architecture. Together, these activities expand the scope of ‘doing’ architecture. His practice centers on the architecture office Various Artists and Architects… and the video project Weird Seoul. Recent projects include the renovation of a single-family house Shoulder to Shoulder (2026) and Brick, Gravel, Schale (2026), an outdoor space at an art museum in Gimhae. For the exhibition Wrinkles and Layers (Clayarch Gimhae Museum, 2026), he made the video work Seosan Good House (2026) and the installation Amateur Armature (2026). He is currently curating an exhibition and conducting research for Unofficial Specifications (2026), selected for the Architecture Art Lab at the ARKO Art Center. He teaches architectural design at Dankook University and the University of Seoul. His publications include Borrowed Life (2024, co-authored).

QF (Kim Malgeum, Ha Sang Hyun) (Curator)
Kim Malgeum holds an M.A. in Art Theory with a thesis on “Anti-architecture,” and a B.A. in Art Studies, Architecture and Arts. Her interests lie in architecture, space, and the image. Kim questions the impossibilities inherent in architecture and the image within contemporary art, through curatorial practice and writing. Her recent curatorial exhibitions include the Korean Young Artists Series wash-in-progress (2026, Korean Cultural Center, Hong Kong), Kaleido (2024, DDP Gallery MUN), Sunset but Radiant (2023, Frame Seongsu), and the 10th Amado Exhibition Award Windows Reconstruction (2023, Amado Art Space). 

Ha Sang Hyun began his practice as an artist before expanding into curating and writing in 2022. His interests lie in how women, queer people, and other marginalized subjects engage with social norms to imagine new forms of power. Rather than focusing on the representation of sexuality through conventional images and language, he explores how sexuality emerges through material processes. His curatorial projects include  Minjae Lee Doppel-Lumpen (2025, the 4th Seoul Arts Awards), Ria Choi Fence-go-round (2025, Hall1), Bench Side (2023, d/p; co-curated), and Minhoon Kim Four Beams (2023, Boan1942).

The Act of Raising: Women and Queers
– Date: Sunday, Dec 13, 14:00–16:00
– Venue: Art Sonje Center, 2F Meeting Room 
– Speaker:  GuNa (Artist), Minhoon Kim (Artist), Leap Lee (Artist), Hwang Sueyon (Artist)
– Moderator: QF (Kim Malgeum, Ha Sang Hyun) (Curator)
– Description: Monumental forms have long been associated with masculinity. Verticality has taken shape through various expression of power—ascension, authority, transcendence, permanence, and representation—while contemporary women and queer artists reinterpret these associations through sculptural practice. Participating artists GuNa, Minhoon Kim, Leap Lee, and Hwang Sueyon join the conversation, focusing on how they approach space in the exhibition. The artists will share the process behind sculpture that bend, tilt, conceal, overturn, and entangle different forces.

GuNa (Artist)
GuNa explores the psychological and physical state of bodily vulnerability through the materiality of sculpture. By confronting the limitations of the body, she poetically expresses a desire to transcend reality, delicately capturing the potential of the heterogeneous body while investigating its simultaneously static and dynamic movements. Through this, she seeks to capture scenes of the body that have long existed and are yet to arrive. GuNa has held solo exhibitions at Boan1942 (2022), Park Soo Keun Museum Pavilion (2020). She has also taken part in group exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (2025, Seoul), SONGEUN (2024, Seoul), Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (2024, Seoul), Amado Art Space (2024, Seoul).

Minhoon Kim (Artist)
Minhoon Kim regards sculpture not as a finished, self-contained form but as an ongoing process in which disparate entities enter into relation and build a state of balance. His work begins with marginal materials, such as discarded objects and severed branches, drawing attention to things that have been rendered obsolete or pushed aside by prevailing systems of social value. Through this, Kim steps outside a worldview centered on efficiency and exchange value, revealing the relationships and possibilities for coexistence that imperfect beings can form with one another. He has held solo exhibitions at The WilloW (2026), Hall 1 (2024), and Boan1942 (2023). He has also taken part in group exhibitions at the xlarge (2026, Seoul), Frieze House Seoul (2025, Seoul), d/p (2023, Seoul).

Leap Lee (Artist)
Leap Lee creates figurative sculptures of the female body using materials such as clay, plaster, and steel. From the perspective of an Asian woman sculptor, my practice considers what the human body looks like today, where and how it might stand, and what constitutes a meaningful way to represent the body. The figures distribute their weight across multiple centers of gravity, continuously renegotiating their balance through shifting points of support. She has held solo exhibitions at Hall 1 (2023), SAPY (2022), WESS (2021). She has also taken part in group exhibitions at the Museum Head (2025, Seoul), ARKO Art Center (2024, Seoul).

Hwang Sueyon (Artist)
Hwang Sueyon views material as entities that hold and transmit layers of social experience, sensation, and time. Through sculptural relationships, she examines how materials, bodies, and social structures shape one another’s conditions, exploring the ways in which they affect one another through physical phenomena and shifts in sensation. Hwang has held solo exhibitions at G Gallery (2024), Arario Gallery (2024), DOOSAN Gallery (2019). She has also taken part in group exhibitions at the Whistle (2023, Seoul), Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (2022, Seoul), MMCA (2019, Gwacheon).