About the exhibition: 

 

Écriture with the Body brings together the work of 18 Korean and Korean American women artists who engage with writing, language, and text-based practices as powerful means of articulating subjectivity and resisting entrenched gender and racial inequalities. Rooted in Korean traditions historically shaped by patriarchy—such as calligraphy and literati painting—the exhibition reclaims these forms through an embodied feminist lens. Here, writing is not merely a tool of communication but a visceral assertion of presence, memory, and identity. By inscribing bodily expression into text, the artists generate transformative encounters for audiences. Their works interrogate and transcend formal conventions, offering renewed perspectives and forging empowering narratives that reclaim space within a historically patriarchal artistic lineage.

This collaboratively organized exhibition spans three venues and is structured around four interrelated subthemes.

First, the artists who challenge traditional Korean artistic modes and genres, particularly literati painting and calligraphy: Seongmin Ahn (minwha), Yeesookyung (jeong-ga), Kim Jipyeong (scroll), and Minsun Oh Mun (genre painting). Their works reimagine these inherited forms, exposing their patriarchal underpinnings and rearticulating them through contemporary perspectives.

Second, the artists who engage with Korean poetry as a site of disturbance and transformation: Yun Suknam (in dialogue with the poems of Heo Nanseoulheon), Jung Jungyeob (with the poetry of Kim Hyesoon), and Kook Dongwan (with her own dream books and journals). Through lyrical, fragmented, and deeply personal expressions, these artists disrupt conventional literary structures to illuminate silenced histories, subconscious emotions, and feminist consciousness.

Third, the artists who inscribe writing through the body as performance and documentation: Hong Lee Hyunsook, Cho Youngjoo, Jean Shin, and Hyun Jung Kim. Here, the body becomes both medium and message—a living text inscribed with memory, affect, and defiance. Their works articulate embodied forms of resistance that speak to gendered histories and corporeal knowledge. In these practices, writing transcends the page, unfolding through gesture, ritual, and presence.

Lastly, the artists reimagine the legacy of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. This section brings together works by Kim Oksun, Ahn Okhyun, Yoon Jeongmee, Jaye Rhee, Su Kwak, Jean Jinho Kim, and the last Theresa Hak Kyung Cha—each engaging with the structural logic of language and its embedded hierarchies. Drawing from embodied, diasporic, and feminist experiences, these artists disrupt fixed systems of meaning and propose new visual and textual grammars. Their practices reimagine ecriture (writing) as fragmented, hybrid, and open-ended—forms that resist assimilation while creating space for multiplicity, uncertainty, and radical subjectivity.