This text was submitted as a proposal to the apexart INTL25 Open Call
Bad Boundaries: Bodies in Tension situates Seoul, Korea, as a site for interrogating the origins of Korean diasporic identity and how womanhood is shaped within transnational experiences--spanning Korean-American, Korean-Canadian, Korean-German, and multi-Asian American diasporic perspectives. The exhibition responds to the broader societal reckoning prompted by the 4B movement, a feminist discourse that emerged in Korea and has recently gained momentum among young feminists in North America. As a challenge to deep-seated patriarchal and capitalist structures, 4B critiques how these systems impose and normalize expectations of women through entrenched cycles of labor, caregiving, and surveillance. Rooted in a rejection of marriage (bihon), childbirth (bichulsan), dating (biyeonae), and heterosexual relationships (bisekseu), 4B challenges the societal control of women's autonomy and bodies. By positioning the body as a politicized medium, Bad Boundaries: Bodies in Tension examines tensions between autonomy and constraint, visibility and erasure, and resistance and conformity through the works of Yon Natalie Mik, Sun Forest, and Lauren Lee.
Yon Natalie Mik's Massage Shop explores gendered labor, precarity, and resilience by documenting the movements of migrant women massage therapists, often marginalized in Korea and the West. In Korea, massage is legal labor only when it is provided by the blind. Their repetitive labor--touch, pressure, and movement--becomes both a site of care and exploitation. By transforming these micro-movements into kinetic expressions of endurance, Mik challenges Western-centric views of choreography and critiques how capitalism exploits migrant and disabled women's bodies as commodified labor. Her work resonates with 4B's resistance to patriarchal labor structures, revealing how bodily autonomy is constrained by economic survival. Yon also plans to collaborate with local masseuses for her performance.
Sun Forest reimagines historical concealment practices as speculative tools for protection and liberation in I Saw New Worlds Beneath the Water, New Skies, and a New Day. Referencing the ssukae-chima, a garment worn by Korean Joseon Dynasty women to obscure themselves from the male gaze, she creates biodegradable cloaking devices that resist patriarchal surveillance. These living sculptures decompose over time, enacting a process of self-erasure and renewal, mirroring 4B's refusal to participate in prescribed gender roles. Through material transformation, Forest envisions feminist survival beyond visibility, surveillance, and capitalist extraction.
Lauren Lee's Womb Walk extends the exhibition's engagement with bodily autonomy and reproductive labor. For this exhibition, her curator-performer, embodies a pregnant woman by carrying Lee's artificial baby from the US to Korea, complicating the relationship between artistic creation, caregiving, and bodily labor. Lee's work interrogates how technology enables and encroaches upon autonomy, exposing the contradictions within 4B's rejection of motherhood in a world where artificial intimacy and reproductive surveillance are increasingly pervasive.
Together, these artists challenge the forces that seek to regulate women's bodies across national and ideological borders. Bad Boundaries: Bodies in Tension calls for reconsidering feminist agency, refusal, and reimagination, engaging with the 4B movement's radical critiques of gendered labor, visibility, and control. Through distinct yet interconnected practices, the exhibition foregrounds resistance as an embodied, speculative, and evolving act.
Bad Boundaries: Bodies in Tension situates Seoul, Korea, as a site for interrogating the origins of Korean diasporic identity and how womanhood is shaped within transnational experiences--spanning Korean-American, Korean-Canadian, Korean-German, and multi-Asian American diasporic perspectives. The exhibition responds to the broader societal reckoning prompted by the 4B movement, a feminist discourse that emerged in Korea and has recently gained momentum among young feminists in North America. As a challenge to deep-seated patriarchal and capitalist structures, 4B critiques how these systems impose and normalize expectations of women through entrenched cycles of labor, caregiving, and surveillance. Rooted in a rejection of marriage (bihon), childbirth (bichulsan), dating (biyeonae), and heterosexual relationships (bisekseu), 4B challenges the societal control of women's autonomy and bodies. By positioning the body as a politicized medium, Bad Boundaries: Bodies in Tension examines tensions between autonomy and constraint, visibility and erasure, and resistance and conformity through the works of Yon Natalie Mik, Sun Forest, and Lauren Lee.
Yon Natalie Mik's Massage Shop explores gendered labor, precarity, and resilience by documenting the movements of migrant women massage therapists, often marginalized in Korea and the West. In Korea, massage is legal labor only when it is provided by the blind. Their repetitive labor--touch, pressure, and movement--becomes both a site of care and exploitation. By transforming these micro-movements into kinetic expressions of endurance, Mik challenges Western-centric views of choreography and critiques how capitalism exploits migrant and disabled women's bodies as commodified labor. Her work resonates with 4B's resistance to patriarchal labor structures, revealing how bodily autonomy is constrained by economic survival. Yon also plans to collaborate with local masseuses for her performance.
Sun Forest reimagines historical concealment practices as speculative tools for protection and liberation in I Saw New Worlds Beneath the Water, New Skies, and a New Day. Referencing the ssukae-chima, a garment worn by Korean Joseon Dynasty women to obscure themselves from the male gaze, she creates biodegradable cloaking devices that resist patriarchal surveillance. These living sculptures decompose over time, enacting a process of self-erasure and renewal, mirroring 4B's refusal to participate in prescribed gender roles. Through material transformation, Forest envisions feminist survival beyond visibility, surveillance, and capitalist extraction.
Lauren Lee's Womb Walk extends the exhibition's engagement with bodily autonomy and reproductive labor. For this exhibition, her curator-performer, embodies a pregnant woman by carrying Lee's artificial baby from the US to Korea, complicating the relationship between artistic creation, caregiving, and bodily labor. Lee's work interrogates how technology enables and encroaches upon autonomy, exposing the contradictions within 4B's rejection of motherhood in a world where artificial intimacy and reproductive surveillance are increasingly pervasive.
Together, these artists challenge the forces that seek to regulate women's bodies across national and ideological borders. Bad Boundaries: Bodies in Tension calls for reconsidering feminist agency, refusal, and reimagination, engaging with the 4B movement's radical critiques of gendered labor, visibility, and control. Through distinct yet interconnected practices, the exhibition foregrounds resistance as an embodied, speculative, and evolving act.
Sue Jeong Ka is a New York?based artist and curator whose work investigates Asian diasporic memory, feminist resistance, and carceral systems.
apexart’s program supporters past and present include the National Endowment for the Arts, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Kettering Family Foundation, the Buhl Foundation, The Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Spencer Brownstone, the Kenneth A. Cowin Foundation, Epstein Teicher Philanthropies, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., William Talbott Hillman Foundation/Affirmation Arts Fund, the Fifth Floor Foundation, the Consulate General of Israel in New York, The Puffin Foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and administered by LMCC, funds from NYSCA Electronic Media/Film in Partnership with Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.