Liminal Figures

Beschreibung

Liminal Figures is an anthology of interviews with fifteen artists and collectives whose practices unfold across shifting cultural, geographic, and linguistic contexts. Co-published by GYOPO and The Floorplan, the publication examines how a generation of artists born in the 1980s and 1990s works within conditions of movement, translation, and multiple forms of belonging. Featured artists include Jesse Chun, Johanna Hedva, Skye Jin, Lotus L. Kang, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, YoungEun Kim, HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander, Heesoo Kwon, Hyeok Lee, Jeewi Lee, Maia Ruth Lee, Na Mira, Gala Porras-Kim, TJ Shin, and Rachel Youn. Developed as a continuation of the inquiry begun with K-Artists (2023)—the first English-language anthology of interviews with forty-seven emerging Korean artists—Liminal Figures does not seek to extend or reinforce a categorical frame. Instead, it moves away from fixed identifiers to examine how in-between conditions are lived, negotiated, and produced through artistic practice. The publication is co-authored by Hyunjoo Byeon and Je Yun Moon, who developed this project through sustained dialogue with a younger generation of diasporic Korean artists whose practices most compellingly inhabit and work through unstable positions. The collaboration with GYOPO further expands this perspective, approaching diaspora not as a singular narrative, but as a range of lived conditions shaped by migration, rupture, and possibility. Structured through conversations conducted between 2024 and 2026, the book treats dialogue as a site where these tensions remain active. Rather than smoothing over differences, the exchanges allow hesitation, elaboration, and partial articulation to remain visible, rather than resolved. What emerges is a process marked by moments of insight as well as ellipses—where translation is never complete, and where understanding is provisional. Across the publication, in the artists’ respective practices, language appears as contested terrain, material as something that shifts and degrades, and institutions as frameworks that organize and constrain visibility and knowledge. Other practices extend toward speculative or cosmological registers that displace human-centered perspectives, or work through sound, narrative, and text as fluid structures for thinking through displacement and history. The publication opens with a foreword by GYOPO and concludes with a text by Diana SeoHyung that moves between poetry, epistolary address, and family history, extending the artists’ conversations into personal reflections on intimacy, language, and migration. Rather than presenting a unified framework, Liminal Figures sustains a set of contingent and relational positions as open questions. Liminality here is not a fixed condition or identity, but a mode of working—one that is continuously produced, negotiated, and reconfigured. In this sense, the book positions conversation not simply as documentation, but as a method for engaging the complexities of contemporary artistic practice.
The first interview publication to center diasporic Korean artists Where diaspora speaks for itself An essential record of diasporic Korean artistic practice Launch events are scheduled to take place on June 24, 2026, in Seoul; June 27, 2026, in Los Angeles; and September 12, 2026, in Berlin. Further details will be announced in due course.

Autor*in

Hyunjoo Byeon
Hyunjoo Byeon (b. 1980) is an independent curator, writer, and publisher based in Berlin and Seoul. She is the co-founder and director of The Floorplan, a curatorial and publishing platform. Her practice takes the curatorial as a mode of research into how art is framed and institutionalized, with writing and publishing as integral extensions of that inquiry. She is the co-author and publisher of K-Artists (Archive Books & The Floorplan, 2023), an anthology of artist interviews that address questions of identity, categorization, and belonging. She has also co-authored Curating Research (Open Editions & de Appel, 2014), and translated The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (MIT Press, 2012) and Curating Subjects (Open Editions, 2007) into Korean. Byeon writes regularly on contemporary art, contributing to various publications and magazines including a monthly column for arte.co.kr. She previously worked at Esther Schipper in Berlin, and at Kukje Gallery and Art Sonje Center in Seoul. As an independent curator, she has curated exhibitions and projects at institutions including Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Alternative Space Loop, Seoul; and galleries such as KÖNIG Telegraphenamt, Berlin, and VSF, Los Angeles. Byeon holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London, and BAs in Business Administration and Art History from Ewha Womans University, Seoul.

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Contemporary Art Diaspora Diasporic Korean Artists

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