Spectrosynthesis /
Art Sonje Center /
Seoul /
Mar 20 – Jun 28, 2026 /
Perhaps to understand the essence of Spectrosynthesis Seoul required stepping out of the show. The fourth edition of a series organised by the Sunpride Foundation – following stops in Taipei (2017), Bangkok (2019) and Hong Kong (2022) – it was also the first large-scale institutional exhibition of queer art in Korea. The more time you spent in the show, the weightier that milestone felt.
Jongno 3-ga, just a 20-minute walk southeast from the show’s venue Art Sonje Center, has long been a gathering place for older gay men in Seoul, with bars, clubs and meeting spots in the alleys of Ikseon-dong and Nakwon-dong. These were spaces that developed organically, with memories held only in the heads of those who lived them, in a country where that history has rarely been documented. Both neighbourhoods are being rapidly gentrified now, and the spaces that served the queer community for decades are being replaced by independent coffee shops and boutique hotels.
Itaewon’s role in shaping queer life is better-known. The presence of a US military base nearby after the Korean War meant bars, clubs and social mixing could thrive there, where they might have been suppressed elsewhere. Within Itaewon, Usadan-ro 12-gil became known as “Homo Hill”, home to safe spaces that had a more international flavour and more visible presence – a foil to Jongno’s more Korean-centric intimacy. The 2022 Itaewon crowd crush tragedy only deepened the neighbourhood’s fraught emotional resonance for many communities, including its queer regulars. The show captured all of this, particularly moments and impressions from the past, with some works even transporting visitors to what they might see in those locations today.
Anessa’s Room (2020) by Jeon Nahwan followed drag performer Hong Il-pyo via an interview in which Hong describes the process of transforming into his alter ego, Anessa, meandering through the nervousness that he experienced before becoming a seasoned performer. Its companion piece was For a Flash (2021), a video that documents Anessa on stage in an Itaewon gay club, complete with silver confetti covering the floor, playing off the images showing on screen. But this was in fact filmed at a space that was closed due to pandemic restrictions, at a time when the shuttering of shared spaces hit the gay community hard.
More subdued, Inhwan Oh’s Where He Meets Him (2026) is an installation of forest green powdered incense on which the artist has traced the names of gay bars and clubs in Seoul – Monster, Saint Otter, Ugly Society, Dirty Heaven, Offramp and many more. It’s lit each morning when the art centre opens. These may once have been spaces rendered to society’s margins but Oh’s olfactory, visual and ritualistic treatment makes them impossible to ignore.
Personal lenses permeated the exhibition, less about South Korea’s LGBTQ scene and more about the private lives of members of its community. Yang Seungwook took over Art Sonje Center’s ticket booth with Chosen Family Next Door (2025), an installation of printed images depicting his relatives, past lovers, friends, people in South Korea’s art community and more. Every image was a “family” portrait, and these are relationships that bind. On the same level, Sejin Song’s Passing Present and Preserving Past (2024) lined a hallway. The artwork was a single-channel video accompanied by photographs captured using a disposable camera. The images featured the recollection of a past relationship, with memories overlaid at two key sites where national tragedies struck – the Itaewon crowd crush and the Sewol ferry disaster – linking personal memory with collective mourning.
The means of communication, and what remains after that communication, was a thread that connected several artworks in the show.
Playwright and theatre director Jahye Khoo presented Exi(s)t Strategy (2026) in the first basement level’s women’s bathroom, while the men’s bathroom beside it was turned into a shared facility for all genders. Lockers in the room evoked the familiar experience of teens hiding something, while lines about gender-affirming surgery were read out by a trans performer. For visitors who stuck around – or read the English translation of the transcript – there was much to dissect.
There was a chorus of voices – Thomas, Charles/Jasmine, Cecilia and a narrator – whose identities blurred and overlapped, mirroring the instability of gender identity. The script includes lines such as “a period shattered so small it can’t even be seen … The author’s name crushed beyond recognition”, using broken punctuation, missing words and other typographic fragmentation as structural metaphors for erased queer lives. Thematically, Khoo’s work navigates school violence, family rejection and religious persecution in a system that is first violent, then cruel by denying the suffering of individuals who are the targets of this treatment.
In this context, where language is strained to its breaking point, that This Video Is Not a Sign Language Interpretation (2023) lands with particular force. The collaborative endeavour involving Yang Seungwook and deaf artist Jiyang Woo features the latter in drag, describing the experience of communicating in sign language in a way that has been called effeminate; Woo signs, “I hope that even in sign language, binary concepts of male and female can break down.” In this work, sign language isn’t supplementary in the way that it might live in a screen’s corner during a broadcast but is a medium that stands on its own – a form of expression that has been policed, queered and then reclaimed. In fact, South Korea’s communities of queer people and those with disabilities have an affinity, one that deepened during the 2024 martial law crisis, when president Yoon Suk Yeol attempted a self-coup. Both groups were among the first to join the protests.
Members of South Korea’s art community commented that Spectrosynthesis Seoul revealed connections with the country’s LGBTQ community that they previously did not realise existed. The exhibition – which was co-curated by Art Sonje Center artistic director Sunjung Kim and the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Yongwoo Lee – felt like a compendium of the Korean queer experience, drawing on some 74 artists and collectives, and giving an outsider like me plenty reasons to linger over the course of three visits. One major shortcoming was the presentation of some artworks drawn from the Sunpride Foundation collection, which felt shoehorned into the show without clear purpose and disconnected from the Korean-centered emotional logic that governed the rest of the presentation.
But overlook those moments and you’ll find an exhibition that contours the full spectrum of human experience – love, pleasure, loss, pain, desire and more. Somewhere along the way, a clear picture of a community emerges. Siren eun young jung’s monumental video Sick Seoul (2026) is a collection of scenes shot in Seoul’s public spaces, with performances of pungmul folk dancers and drummers spliced in, capturing the Korean queer community’s activism in response to martial law in 2024 and Israel’s invasion and ongoing destruction of Gaza. There is no narrative, no specific character to follow, but jung captures the group at its most politically charged and socially engaged. Its members are doing what they can to make their home a better place, just like anyone else. This is relayed succinctly in the epigraph that appears at the beginning of jung’s video, borrowed from a celebrated 1945 poem by Oh Janghwan that shares a title with the video work and inspired it:
“Rebellion! Rebellion! How tearfully exhilarating is this?”
光．合作用—首爾
首爾善宰藝術中心
2026年3月20日至6月28日
或許只有跳出「光．合作用—首爾」的展場，才能真正捕捉這場展覽的精神。驕陽基金會在台北（2017年）、曼谷（2019年）及香港（2022年）策展後，為系列帶來第四個篇章，這個展覽更是韓國首個由大型機構主導的酷兒藝術展覽。在展覽中停留愈久，這一個里程碑的份量便愈發沉重。
距離展場善宰藝術中心東南方約二十分鐘步程的鐘路三街，長久以來一直是首爾年長男同志的集中地，益善洞與樂園洞的巷弄匯聚酒吧、夜店與各式聚會場所，空間在歲月中自然形成。在這個國家，這類歷史鮮少被記錄，記憶往往只存在於親歷者的腦海之中。如今，這兩個社區正被迅速仕紳化，曾服務酷兒社群數十載的空間，逐步由獨立咖啡店與精品酒店所取代。
相比之下，梨泰院在塑造酷兒生活方面的角色較為人熟悉。韓戰後，由於鄰近美軍基地，當地的酒吧、夜店與社交活動得以蓬勃發展。若在其他地區，這類場所很可能早已受到壓抑。梨泰院的雩祀壇路十二街漸被稱為「Homo Hill」，成為一個更有國際化氣氛和能見度的安全空間，與鐘路偏向韓國本土和親密內聚的氛圍形成對比。2022年梨泰院人踩人悲劇，進一步加深了這個地區在許多群體（包括酷兒常客）心中的情感張力。展覽捕捉了這一切，尤其是關於過去的片段與印象，有些作品更讓參觀者彷彿置身於這些地點如今的樣貌之中。
Jeon Nahwan的《Anessa’s Room》（2020年）透過訪談追隨變裝表演者Hong Il-pyo，由他敘述轉化為分身Anessa的過程，細細鋪陳他從最初的緊張不安，到成為一名成熟表演者的轉變。相應的錄像作品《For a Flash》（2021年）則記錄Anessa在梨泰院一間同志夜店舞台上的演出，銀色紙屑鋪滿地面，與屏幕上的影像互相呼應。然而，這段錄像其實是在一個因疫情限制而關閉的空間拍攝。那段時間共享空間被迫關閉，對同志社群造成重大衝擊。
吳仁煥的《Where He Meets Him》（2026年）則是一件比較內斂的裝置作品，藝術家在森林綠色的香粉上書寫Monster、Saint Otter、Ugly Society、Dirty Heaven和Offramp等首爾同志酒吧與夜店的名字，在展覽中心每日開放時焚燒。這些空間或曾被置於社會邊緣，但吳仁煥透過氣味、視覺與儀式的處理，使它們重新化成無法忽視的存在。
個人視角貫穿整個展覽，關注的不是韓國LGBTQ的圈子，而是社群成員的私人生活。Yang Seungwook的裝置作品《Chosen Family Next Door》（2025年）佔據了善宰藝術中心的售票處，透過印刷影像呈現他的親人、舊愛、朋友，以及韓國藝術圈的人物等。每一張影像都是「全家幅」，而這些關係構成了彼此之間的連結。在同一樓層，Sejin Song的《Passing Present and Preserving Past》（2024年）沿着走廊展開。作品為單頻錄像，配以即棄相機拍攝的照片，呈現一段過往關係的回憶。記憶疊加於梨泰院人踩人事件與世越號沉船事故兩個國家悲劇發生的關鍵場域，將個人記憶與集體哀悼交織在一起。
溝通的方式以及溝通之後所留下的痕跡，成為展覽一條串聯多件作品的隱線。
劇作家兼劇場導演Jahye Khoo在地庫一層的女廁中呈現《Exi(s)t Strategy》（2026年），而一旁的男廁則被改造成性別共用設施。房間內的儲物櫃喚起青少年隱藏秘密的熟悉經驗；與此同時，一位跨性別表演者朗讀著關於性別肯定手術的台詞。對於願意停留和閱讀英文翻譯的參觀者而言，作品提供了豐富的解讀空間。
作品中出現Thomas、Charles／Jasmine、Cecilia以及一名敘述者的聲音，他們的身份模糊交錯，映照出性別認同的不穩定性。劇本中包括如「一個被粉碎至眼不可見的句號……作者的名字被壓碎得面目全非」等語句，透過破碎的標點、缺失的詞語與碎裂的文字形式，隱喻那些被抹除的酷兒生命。在主題上，Jahye Khoo的作品穿梭於校園暴力、家庭排斥與宗教迫害之間，揭示一個先是暴力、再以否認受害者痛苦而展現殘酷的體制。
在這個語言被拉扯至極限的脈絡之中，《This Video Is Not a Sign Language Interpretation》（2023年）顯得格外有力。這件作品由Yang Seungwook與聽障藝術家Jiyang Woo合作，後者以變裝形象出現，講述以被視為柔弱的手語溝通的經驗。Jiyang Woo以手語表達：「我希望即使在手語之中，男女二元的概念也能被打破。」在作品中，手語不是廣播畫面角落的輔助資訊，而是一種獨立的媒介，一種曾被規訓、被酷兒化，最終又被重奪的表達形式。事實上，韓國的酷兒社群與殘障社群關係密切。在2024年戒嚴危機期間，當總統尹錫悅試圖發動自我政變時，連結進一步加深，兩個群體亦是最早走上街頭抗議的群體之一。
韓國藝術界人士認為「光．合作用—首爾」揭示了他們過去從未察覺的本地LGBTQ社群連結。這個由善宰藝術中心藝術總監金宣廷與香港中文大學李龍雨共同策展的展覽，彷彿是一部韓國酷兒經驗的彙編，匯集約74位藝術家與團體，讓像我這樣的外行人三次到訪都流連忘返。展覽其中一個主要缺點，是部分來自驕陽基金會館藏的作品呈現略顯生硬，彷彿被強加展覽之中，既缺乏明確目的，也與整體以韓國為中心的情感脈絡有所脫節。
不過，排除那些片刻，展覽勾勒出人類經驗的完整光譜──愛、歡愉、失落、痛苦、慾望等。在觀展過程中，社群的輪廓逐漸清楚浮現。鄭恩瑛的大型錄像作品《Sick Seoul》（2026年）由在首爾公共空間拍攝的片段組成，穿插農樂民俗舞者與鼓手的表演，呈現韓國酷兒社群對2024年戒嚴以及以色列入侵並持續摧毀加沙的回應與行動。作品沒有敘事，也沒有特定角色，但鄭恩瑛捕捉到這個群體在政治張力最強、社會參與度最積極的時刻。他們與其他人一樣，正盡所能讓自己的家園變得更好，作品開頭引用的一段題辭正簡潔地傳達了這點。題辭取自吳章煥於1945年發表的一首著名同名詩作，亦是錄像的靈感來源：
「反抗！反抗！這是多麼令人含淚激奮的喜悅？」