Essays & Articles
▾ Reconfiguring the Public Sphere
Essay
Art in Culture (Zoom In / Pitching), February 2026
Seoul, South Korea
*Full text available upon request.
This essay examines the Gaza Biennale Berlin Pavilion (2025) not as a symbolic gesture of solidarity but as an infrastructural condition in which speech itself becomes unstable. Rather than framing the Pavilion as an expansion of the public sphere, the text argues that it exposes the structural limits of institutional addressability. In Berlin—a city often imagined as a site of open discourse—pro-Palestinian speech is formally permitted yet structurally precarious, subject to funding withdrawal, cancellation, and institutional distancing.
The Pavilion did not seek to restore the public sphere nor propose an alternative institutional model. Instead, it sustained a condition in which speech remains delayed, untranslated, and partially unresolved. Understanding becomes secondary to endurance. The exhibition’s dispersed structure across independent spaces was not an aesthetic choice but a political technique—distributing risk and refusing the concentration of vulnerability within a single institution.
Foregrounding invisible labor—translation, file transfer, spatial coordination, reinstallation—the essay situates the Pavilion within an infrastructural turn in contemporary art. Infrastructure becomes visible precisely when it falters. In this sense, the Pavilion does not offer a solution but renders perceptible the conditions under which art can appear when institutional guarantees recede.
The essay ultimately asks whether such provisional configurations constitute a repeatable political form or remain temporary exposures of systemic limits.
▾ Strategic Non-Alignment and Networked Agency
New Generation Art and Institutional Voids in 1990s South Korea
Academic Article
VOL. 46 3/4 Aesthetics of Non-Alignment, 2025
Amsterdam, Netherlands
*Full text available upon request.
Emerging with MUSEUM’s inaugural exhibition in 1987, so‑called New Generation Groups—marked by an explicit distance from fixed ideologies, an emphasis on personal narratives, kitsch-tinged sensibilities, and alternative exhibition formats—coalesced as small, agile constellations. This study examines how New Generation Groups such as MUSEUM, Golden Apple, and SUB CLUB fashioned non‑aligned modes of artistic agency within South Korea’s post–Cold War milieu from 1987 to 1995.
In a period when the art field remained polarized—an institutional modernist bloc (Dansaekhwa) closely aligned with American hegemony on one side, and Minjung art drawing on socialist‑leaning principles and anti‑American activism on the other—these groups did not merely reject or skirt the margins of dominant paradigms. Instead, they mobilised temporary infrastructures and collaborative tactics to open new interstitial zones within the existing system. As state‑led cultural democratisation adopted the rhetoric of pluralism while facilitating Segyehwa (globalisation), their strategies bore both generative promise and built‑in constraints.
Through case‑based analysis of selected projects, this article traces the formation of hybrid networks by New Generation Groups and their later absorption into institutional and curatorial regimes—revealing a dynamic stratum of 1990s South Korean contemporary art.
▾ Dear Lady with the Lovely Nails
Fiction
n.b.k. Berlin Band, Vol.16, 2025
Berlin, Germany
*Full text available upon request.
“Dear Lady with the Lovely Nails” unfolds as a fictional letter addressed to a woman encountered in a temple. Through an intimate narrative voice, the text moves from a casual conversation about nail polish toward intergenerational labor, migration, and unfulfilled aspirations.
Beginning with the memory of swollen hands stained by domestic work, the narrator reflects on survival after displacement, raising a daughter amid rural-urban transition, and the fragile promise of upward mobility through marriage. Red nail polish appears briefly as a symbol of dignity and self-recognition, only to chip away under the pressure of labor.
The letter format allows memory to open indirectly—through anecdote rather than argument. Feminist questions of care, class mobility, gendered labor, and rural transformation surface through lived detail rather than theoretical framing. The temple becomes a site where private memory and collective history intersect.
Rather than offering resolution, the text preserves ambiguity. The polished surface of beauty coexists with exhaustion, resilience, and loss. In doing so, the story foregrounds the quiet endurance of women whose labor sustains both family and nation yet remains structurally unacknowledged.
▾ Rusticity: 촌스럽다
Essay
ama-gum ed.1. 2024
Berlin, Germany
*Full text available upon request.
“Rusticity: 촌스럽다” traces the historical and affective construction of the Korean term chon-seu-reop-da—a word commonly used to describe something outdated, unfashionable, or embarrassingly rural. Beginning with autobiographical reflections on returning to Anyang after nearly a decade abroad, the essay situates rusticity not as an aesthetic judgment but as a symptom of Korea’s accelerated modernization.
Through urban transformation, colonial historiography, Confucian nationalism, and post-1990s neoliberal cultural policy, the text maps how “ruralness” became associated with backwardness while “tradition” was selectively curated as national identity. What was once an undifferentiated temporal continuum—where past and present coexisted—was reorganized under modernization into categories of the modern and the obsolete.
The essay links rusticity to processes of monster-like urbanization, colonial “local colour” aesthetics, state-sponsored Confucian identity, and the commodification of tradition under globalization. The rise of “K-culture” branding complicates this dynamic: traditions that circulate successfully become marketable heritage, while unsellable remnants are relegated to rusticity.
Yet rusticity resists stable definition. It oscillates between embarrassment, nostalgia, resentment, and reluctant admiration. In its persistence, rusticity reveals the unresolved tensions between memory, modernization, commodification, and belonging. Rather than dismissing the rustic as merely outdated, the essay asks what forms of endurance survive within what we are taught to reject.
