how women, queer, and non-binary artists are changing the Korean art scene

From Haig Young’s major retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery (until 5 January 2025) to the intuitive work of Myre Lee An open wound installation in the nearby Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern (until 16 March 2025) and Lee Bul’s dynamic sculptures occupying the Met’s Fifth Avenue facade (until 27 May 2025), South Korean women artists are currently active in London and New York. But these prominent figures are only indicative of what I discovered on a recent visit: a number of women, queer, and non-binary artists are radically changing Korea’s art scene, delving into the country’s hidden history, challenging gender orthodoxies, and pushing other conversations in exciting new directions.

The works of siren Yoon Young Jeong, whom I met during a studio visit, shed light on elements of post-war Korean life that have been buried beneath the gloss of 21st-century K-beauty and K-pop. As a child, she witnessed the violent aftermath of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and was introduced to women’s studies while studying painting at Ehwa Women’s University in the 1990s. “The feminist movement grew on campus, and through solidarity with environmental, queer, and peace groups, I learned to listen to the voices of those who were excluded from history, politics, and art,” she told me. Later studies with feminist art historian Griselda Pollock at the University of Leeds in the early 2000s cemented this focus.

One of Jung’s most significant current projects explores yeoseong gukgeuk, a form of traditional Korean theater in which all the roles are played by women and the male actors have gained a special following, even staging fantasy weddings with fans. Particularly popular in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was later sidelined by the pro-capitalist authoritarian Park Chung-hee administration and all but disappeared by the 1980s. For more than 15 years, jung has worked with a handful of surviving artists, making films, collecting archives, and staging performances featuring contemporary transgender musicians, lesbian actresses, and drag kings. One of these performances was featured in a multi-channel video installation in the Korea Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and Jung continues to work with Korea’s current queer performance scene and assert her place in the Yoson Gukkek lineage.

Prevailing norms and expectations about age, beauty and femininity are at the heart of Woo Hannah’s lush textile sculptures. In 2023, Wu inaugurated the first Frieze Art Fair in Seoul with her giant installation Grand ballroomin which she used hanging ruffled branches, pleated fabric with wrinkles and hanging teardrop shapes to celebrate women’s breasts, motherhood and the glory of wrinkled skin. “In my Rococo ballroom, everyone celebrates their youth and their old age—I don’t want to make any hierarchies between youth and old age,” she said when the work was unveiled.

Today, she continues to use body image to challenge what is considered acceptable or horrible and horrible. In her studio in the wooded hills overlooking Seoul, Wu showed me her latest series Bleeding sculptures that are huge bright fabric flowers resembling female genitals. These works, with glittering clusters of appliquéd red beads, celebrate the menstrual cycle, which is still not a popular theme in Korean art or anywhere else.

“I’m thinking about what age Korean society thinks is the ‘appropriate’ age to have children and reproduce, and how we should treat our bodies as women,” Woo says. “One of my main goals is to abandon the binary division and establish a horizontal relationship with us and all beings – nature should not be in the background.”

Tatiana’s wisdom

Age-old female traditions—or what they call “auntie wisdom”—dominate the activities of Seoul’s but peripheral Rice Brewing Sisters Club (RBSC). This shape-shifting collective was formed in 2018 by Hyemin Song, Alethea Hyun-Jin Shin, and Soyun Ryu, who continue to share a common interest in what they describe as “social fermentation.” This fluid term expands the concept of fermentation beyond biochemical brewing to a wide range of community activities and conceptual art.

From early projects that drew on ancient skills often held by women related to the preparation of fermented foods and beverages, their work has now expanded to include writing, biolab experiments on crop cultivation, and oral history documentation. In addition to residencies in cities such as Seoul, Anseong, and Busan, RBSC also collaborates with brewers, farmers, storytellers, artists and writers, and community organizations both in and outside of South Korea.

Speaking about the central theme of their work when we met on the roof of a warehouse in Seoul, they said: “Fermentation occurs in every aspect of the environment, in the air, on land, and also in the ocean with the help of marine microorganisms.” To this end, RBSC has recently been working with a seaweed called agar-agar, which has many uses and grows along the coasts of South Korea and Japan and is traditionally harvested by hand by women divers.

At the 2022 Busan Biennale, their sculptural installation was made from agar agar that grows around the nearby shoreline. He was shaped by a deep familiarity with the rituals and spiritual beliefs of the local Haenyeo population, female divers who work on the South Korean island of Jeju.

Recognizing the potential of agar-agar as a sustainable bio-substitute for plastic, RBSC created a commercial structure that aims to support their efforts, as well as those of divers, through the sale of low-cost agar-agar products.

Feminism in the foreground

The 2024 Busan Biennale (which closed in October) also had a strong female presence, curated by Vera May and Philippe Pirott. At the Busan Museum of Modern Art, the main venue, one of the first rooms was dominated by a parade of more than 57 dramatic portraits of female Korean independence activists by Yoon Suknam, many of them executed in the Chesaekwa, or Korean polychrome, technique. A pioneer of Korean feminist art, 85-year-old Yoon Women of resistance The series foregrounds a multi-generational group of female heroes—nurses, teachers, scientists, and firefighters—who have long been overlooked and overshadowed by their male counterparts.

The name of this year’s Busan Biennale was See in the darka theme defined by the curators as a celebration of opacity and marginality, which organizers say offers a “comprehensive alternative” to societal norms. The concept was developed through the dual concept of “pirate enlightenment”, which revolved around early so-called pirate utopias that offered egalitarian, gendered refuges for those operating outside society, and “Buddhist enlightenment”, emphasizing a selfless, nationless, selfless departure from social life

Pirate paradise

Among the many artists at the Busan Biennale who examined these ideas from a feminist perspective was Dina Nomena Andriarimanjaka from Madagascar, who, using collages and annotated archival images, letters, embroidered textiles and tapestries, delves into the little-known stories of indigenous Malagasy queens and princesses. These female rulers allegedly collaborated with sailors, pirates, and outlaws to form Libertalia, a prototype of a pirate utopia where people of all colors, creeds, and beliefs, including women, could live without notice.

The dominance of men in Buddhism was addressed in the event in the humorous paintings of Korean artist Bang Jeong Ah, who give a subversive feminine form to the male sculptures of Arhats, works depicting a person who has achieved enlightenment. Instead of radiating a beautiful calm, Bang Arhat’s women in swimwear offer a more realistic image of everyday life as they toss and turn on a stormy sea, trying to stay afloat.

The rarely discussed misogyny in Buddhism has also been explored by the London-based Chinese-born artist Han Mengyun in Night Sutra. Embedded in Dong’s textile installation, this three-channel video alludes to both the format of a Buddhist manuscript and the shape of an open womb. In it, women from around the world and a series of sculptural backdrops tell stories of motherhood, exile, diaspora and trauma.

Whether in Busan, Seoul, or the wider art world, the patriarchy seems to be getting a new, satisfying blow.