<One Action One Day> is a project which reviews a contemporary art exhibition in Korea. We are publishing the letter-type exhibition review ‘Letter’ and conversation-type exhibition review ‘Would you like to go see the exhibition?’ (in short 'WSE').

In ‘WSE’, we watch an exhibition and talk about what we saw there with a person who we like in the art scene. This content places somewhere between an interview, a personal conversation, and an exhibition review. This episode includes a lot of exhibition stories, so we’re glad. :)

Exhibition we saw: 《Korea Artist Prize 2023 - Kang Seung Lee: Who will care for our caretakers?》 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul)

Members: Sangwoon Jung, Jiyoung Hong, siren eun young jung, Jaehun

siren eun young jung is a Korean artist, part-time lecturer, and audience of queer/feminist art. She, unlike other mid-career artists, attends talk programs uninvited as an audience member, and has consistently recorded in various publications the achievements of queer/feminist exhibitions she has seen and the blind spots in mainstream discourse. In the Korean art world, where it is not easy just to sustain one's own career, her consistent speaking out and raising questions about common agendas reminds us the belief she once said: “The best way we can do for a better future is a commitment to the community.”.

While watching those activities, Jaehun thought it would be interesting to see Kang Seung Lee’s exhibition which deals with the queer community along with siren. He then invited the members who would make the conversation even more colorful.

Sangwoon Jung co-runs Tank Press, a publishing company and art book collective, and talks about urban land and queer through photography and drawings. He joined looking forward to a place where we could share our own stories and empathize with each other.

Jiyoung Hong is a member of the team Without Frame! (W/O F.) and takes black and white photographs. Being able to talk with the people she likes made her accept the invitation.

Part 1

1. Cactus as a Queer Future: <Archive in Dirt>, and Remembering the people who have passed away
- Jaehun: Today, I was drawn to the docent who was explaining <Archive in Dirt> in front of the exhibition entrance. ‘After Harvey Milk, America’s first gay politician, passed away, his lover gave part of the cactus that Harvey had grown to his friends as an progeny, and the cactus was passed on to the curator of this exhibition through artist Kang Seung Lee, and became the work <Archive in Dirt>.’ The audience, who seemed like ‘middle aged women’ married to their husband, nodded their heads after hearing the explanation about a queer future. It felt like a gesture of receiving a part of the cactus.

- Sangwoon: I also paid attention to the method of careness suggested by this exhibition. A guy said that to me once. “We will be either celebrities or shamans.” At the time, I wondered what the phrase meant, but recently I thought it might have come from a sense of crisis that we might not be able to leave an offspring. Because people with sexual orientation who cannot have children often wonder, ‘What can I leave behind after I die?’

- Jiyoung: At the same time, I also thought about being archived by other artists. In this exhibition, most of the people the artist quotes in his work are dead. I know how important it is to remember and archive the queer death, but I think archiving is such a complex issue. The archiving methods that highlight specific aspects of a dead person are likely to involve fragmentary ‘characterization’ of the subject. Kang Seung Lee is also a good archivist, but on the other hand, I got the impression that he was bringing characters and collecting them.


2. The other and community as a topic of an art
- Sangwoon: In the same context, there is a question I have always had. I am afraid of dealing with the stories of others outside of myself through my work. I wondered, ‘Am I ruining them or using them for my own sake?’. So when I feel like I want to do something like that, I often ask myself, "Why should 'I' do it?" How did you come to decide making an artwork with the other's story?

- siren: Usually, as you get older, your life often becomes more stable rather than more hard. Then, you will be able to see the outside of yourself a little better. At times like that, when I ask myself what gave me the strength to come this far, the thought clearly occurs to me, ‘I would have walked this far at the same pace with the community I committed myself to.’ I feel that what Kang Seung said in the artist interview, ‘I never achieved this on my own,’ has a similar meaning.

And although most artists create work by extracting what is inside themselves, I believe that the story will eventually run out. However, when I approach an art in solidarity with the other's stories, I feel like the world expands even more. However, as these methodologies become more and more similar and the concepts used in them continue to be abstracted, there is a definite feeling that specific relationships and individual lives are becoming invisible. We keep shouting ‘Community is important!’, but the truth is, no one wants to live tied down to a physical community for so long. At the same time, people consider 'community as a concept' to be very important. Those problems remain.


3. A sense of community. It was like this in siren’s time.


4. When sharing a sense of community inside and outside of it (1)

Part 2

5. When sharing a sense of community inside and outside of it (2)
- siren: You may think that queer magazines like 『GET』 or 『DUIRO』 are just materials, but when the people who created the magazine are no longer there and only materials remain, it creates a very strange emotion. In this constant process of the world changing as time passes and people die and things are lost, I feel complicated emotions when I see someone dusting off certain pieces of history and placing them on a gentle table like this.

There must have been very deep emotions buried inside there. But I think there was a time when those emotions didn't come out in the artwork, and now I think Kang Seung has touched on those emotions. When I first saw his work in 《Garden》 in 2018, I felt that kind of emotion in a subtle way, and it made me feel like I was ruminating on my life.

On the other hand, hetero artists who have settled down peacefully in the Korean art world simply accept and admire Kang Seung’s work as a completely depoliticized and desexualized stereotypical equation of ‘gay + delicacy.’ I also believe that Lee Kang-seung, as an artist, raised some issues to talk about in the Korean art world, in the sense that he showed that completely different reactions about the artwork occur depending on whether one knows or does not know a specific context.


6. When queer art enters the center of institutions


7. University (of Art)


8. Interface between social movements and theory -> Making a theory based on one’s experience
- Jaehun: If you look at the social media account of Chacha, the Sex Worker Liberation Action Movement, they keep sharing the violent administration of Paju City that you don't know how to react to. “The police are coming with demolition trucks and ruthlessly destroying the buildings where we work and live. Even though people are currently hanging on guard from a utility pole as high as the third floor of an apartment building, they keep coming in.” But people really don't care at all. Similarly, among the many issues surrounding queer people, I think some parts are talked about too much, while the opposite side is not really highlighted.

- siren: That was also the biggest reason why Douglas Crimp insisted that we should talk about the art of the AIDS crisis. By the way, when Jiyoung goes to Chacha's protest and takes pictures, it's not like you first encountered the theory and decided to take pictures, right? You just start working and then find the language?

- Jiyoung: I’m not sure which came first, but there is something like this. Things you have to read to say. For example, I have a fetishistic fondness for sex workers. But for a while, I couldn't say this feeling. Because I didn't know if I could talk about it. Some people just take pictures of high-rise buildings because it’s ‘cool’. I think the reason why I volunteered to take a picture for Chacha was because my initial motivation was similar to the person who takes pictures of the high-rise buildings. Because the people there and the place are appealing to me. But to be able to speak like this, I had to study it.

- siren: Sara Ahmed says something meaningful in the preface to the book 『Living a Feminist Life』. It's too easy and quick to develop a solid theory by borrowing the language of white men who have already proven themselves, but she says she won't do that. She declares that she will do this even though it may be a house made of straw and prone to falling over. What you just said was very similar to what Ahmed said, so I thought if you had read that book and talked about it. In fact, perspectives based on the experience of the body are the perspectives and methodologies of theory and practice that have emerged a lot in feminist art.