나쁜 (애)도 / Bad Lament

On October 29, 2022, two contrasting processions unfolded in Seoul. A small queer cultural festival in a local neighborhood filled the streets with percussive beats, drawing in residents who had never encountered the word “queer” before. For a brief moment, the community and queer youth danced together, celebrating an ephemeral yet meaningful sense of pride. Later that night, some festival attendees moved to Itaewon for the Halloween celebrations—only to find themselves caught in one of the most tragic crowd crush disasters in recent history. The news of the disaster spread faster than the official reports, leaving many desperately reaching out to friends who had gone to Itaewon, hoping not to hear their names among the victims.

The Itaewon tragedy¹, which claimed 159 lives, exposed the systematic erasure of marginalized identities. Despite Itaewon’s history as Korea’s only LGBTQ+ hub, no official reports addressed how many queer individuals were among the victims. The government’s public mourning excluded photographs and names, reducing them to anonymous statistics. Foreign victims’ families faced bureaucratic barriers and language obstacles, highlighting the inequalities in collective grief.

This erasure is not new. From the 1948 “Jeju Massacre”² to the 2014 “Sewol Ferry Disaster”³, mass deaths have been handled with systemic neglect, reinforcing the exclusion of certain communities from public remembrance. Globally, war, disaster, and social violence continue to shape who is remembered and who is forgotten. The proliferation of death burdens us with unresolved grief, manifesting in physical and psychological distress. While death is universal, its social and political treatment remains deeply unequal.

Curators Minseon Kim and Sam Blumenfeld have deeply personal, social, and political relationships to their grief and their mourning based on their individual relationships to loss and their cultural relation. Featuring a roster of Korean, Chilean, and American artists of different backgrounds, the works encompass narratives of immigration, personal loss, transition, and the loss of expectation of a life before coming out and reconciling with queerness as a personal experience. From performance, documentation, installation, and sculpture, all of the works seek to build care and space while acknowledging the personal shift that takes place in oneself through the process of loss, specifically through the queer lens.

Jun!yi Min is a performance artist, filmmaker, curator, and educator from Singapore living and working in Brooklyn. She graduated from her MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego in 2024. Jun! has exhibited and performed at the Mingei Museum, Bread and Salt Gallery, Mandeville Art Gallery, Elliott Hundley Studio, and Best Practice in California. Her performance films have also been screened at A Space Gallery, Millennium Film Workshop, and at the MoMA in New York.

Ru Kim utilizes performance and video installations to question the use of art in resisting and reappropriating perpetuations of violence generated by patriarchal, imperial, and colonial ideologies of domination. Moving through their own fluidity in language, culture, and identity, Recent projects focus particularly on stories told through the lens of the more-than-human witness, strategies of water as seen through a hydrofeminist lens, documentation of queerness in Korean history, and archives revealing the “Asian” construction enacted by the Western gaze. This work reflects on the relationship between San Julio and the snakes he destroyed in order to pave the way towards his own martyrdom.

Camila Pizarro’s work reflects her journey as an immigrant, a nomad, and an artist navigating the tension between belonging and displacement as a testament to the power of art to heal, resist, and reimagine. Through her work, she strives to place herself and others in a space of authenticity, where the personal becomes universal and the past informs the present. The work examines the overlapping loss of her grandmother and her rejection from Korean borders.

Soeun Bae is an artist based in New York working with sculpture, technology, and performance to question what it is to be living inside of a body. Her work delves into the politics of care, sexuality, and production. She points towards vulnerable bodies; femme, queer, poc, through reimaginations that reflect experiences of isolation and dysfunction in a personal and socio-political body. She explores the dissection, mechanization, and objectification to birth a hybrid body that holds potential for optimization as it becomes altered, tested, and used.

Black Jaguar has carried out projects that give visibility to various marginalized identities within Korean society. Primarily working with performance art, the artist’s early works involved boldly revealing their own body. Over time, these evolved into practices that inscribe the artist into the realm of public memory in Korea, thereby rewriting history. Notable works include Bath at Noon (2011), a shower performance staged at the fountain in the plaza of the Jeonnam Provincial Office, and VEGA (2016), a performance in which audiences on the opposite side of a roadway listened—face to face—to the voices of mothers who lost their children in the Sewol Ferry Disaster. Her video diptych considers the imperialist relationship between Korea and the US through the loss of environment and history in the building of the US Naval Base on Jeju Island⁴ and its impact on indigenous practices and community-building.

Born in New York City and raised between Tokyo, Frankfurt, and London, K Rawald comes from a multicultural and diverse background, no less being queer, genderfluid, neurodivergent, and mixed-race themself. Through their reclamation of ‘otherness’, K’s work plays within the liminal spaces of hybridity and the extraordinary, dreaming of possible futures, while daring to touch upon the pain of the present and the past. K Rawald’s (USA) installation builds space for loss and reflection among their own grief in the loss of family members and in the aftermath of the US presidential election.

Collaborating with contemporary artists across various disciplines, Hyoungju’s work spans film, exhibition video, and archiving. He explores the conditions of artistic production and the ethics of visual representation through his ongoing practice. While Jungsik starts his creative process by writing texts, which are then developed into various media such as published books, videos, or installations. As a Person Living with HIV/AIDS(PLHA), the artist presents works that “add a narrative focus and expressive strength to often conventional and superficially approached topics such as social minorities. Jungsik Lee and Hyoungju Kim’s (KOR) piece is a narrative concerning the loss of a foreign queer sex worker.

Based between Seoul and Cologne, On Lee works on the boundary between diaspora and dysphoria, using the body as a medium that can expand without restriction. Based on performance and the performative theatrical self, Lee traces the flow of the extended body in various ways, mainly in virtual environments. The two works continuously screened in this exhibition visualize a state of being that cannot be reduced to a singular body, sensuously presenting new connections formed through expanded perception, proposing a queer sensibility of mourning and solidarity.

zozo seeks to explore and sensitize the linguistic voids stemming from marginalization and abnormality. Through a diverse range of media including video, text, painting, and installation, she/they delve into themes of violence, death, madness, ominous signs, and the lives and bodies of queer individuals tabooed by society. zozo’s piece reflects on the personal loss of both their friend and their aunt as a study of misogynistic violence in Korea and reconciling its meaning.

In addition, the project reinterprets traditional mourning structures—such as Korea’s Manshin (shamanic rituals) and Judaism’s minyan (a collective mourning practice), to establish a fluid, inclusive grief community. We seek to dismantle patriarchal and institutional mourning frameworks, embracing all voices in the grieving process. Instead of dictating how grief should be performed, we propose a space where mourning can be chaotic, fragmented, and nonconforming, where “bad mourning” is not a failure, but a form of resistance.

The title Bad Lament 나쁜 (애)도 challenges normative grieving practices and reclaims the right to grieve outside societal expectations. In a world where public mourning often silences the marginalized, this project asserts that no grief is “wrong.” By embracing the voices of the “bad,” we carve out a space where loss is not only remembered but transformed into a collective presence.

Open Call Exhibition
© apexart 2025

1. Mackenzie, Jean, “Itaewon Crush: Survivors Are Still Tormented a Year On,” bbc, October 25, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/67203564
2. Newsweek Staff, “Ghosts of Cheju,” Newsweek, March 13, 2010, https://www.newsweek.com/ghosts-cheju-160665
3. Hundreds Missing in Tragic Ferry Sinking,” Hankyoreh, n.d., https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/633260.html
4. Wunrow, Stephen. Naval Base in Jeju Archives - Korean Quarterly. May 14, 2020. Korean Quarterly. https://www.koreanquarterly.org/tag/naval-base-in-jeju.