During Frieze week, Seoul gets an advance sample of the Korean edition of the Sunpride Foundation’s ongoing Spectrosynthesis exhibition series, which surveys LGBTQ+ Asian art.
While dates for next year’s main show, at the city’s Art Sonje Center, are not yet confirmed, off-site 2: Eleven Episodes (until October 26) teases how Korea might add to the project that started in 2017 in Taipei and has since continued in Bangkok and Hong Kong.
Off-site 2, split between Kukje Gallery K2 and (Together)(Together) includes performances by Yagwang, Younghae Chang, Ru Kim and Jimin Hah at the galleries plus Frieze Seoul and Dosan Park during the fair. Yagwang’s durational procession involving spoken word, movement and song, Raw Proof: Echo, will proceed through Coex on 4 September. Art Sonje Center’s artistic director Sunjung Kim and Space for Contemporary Art’s project director Jina Kim have curated the 11 Korean emerging female and genderqueer artists, who also include Sojin Kwak, Moon Sanghoon and Han Sol.
The project adds gender sensitivity as a topic alongside the queer narratives explored in the previous three Sunpride exhibitions. Sunjung Kim, who will curate the larger exhibition next year, says gender’s incorporation in this iteration “reflects our aim to address how contemporary Korean society is experienced through questions of gender, power and identity. By this, we mean an awareness of gender-based differences and socially constructed roles, and a conscious response to the inequalities they produce.”
“The participating artists move beyond the male-female binary,” she says, “engaging with diverse gender identities and posing complex questions about the body and power structures. In Korea, where debates around gender and representation are especially pressing”, with women’s rights and men’s privileges increasingly polarising, “it felt crucial to foreground this perspective and highlight how artists respond to the spirit of the times.”
- off-site 2: Eleven Episodes Performance, 3-5 September