Écriture with the Body: Contemporary Korean Women’s Art [Opening Talk]

The Korean Cultural Center Washington, D.C. (KCCDC), in partnership with the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design and IA&A at Hillyer, is proud to present Écriture with the Body: Contemporary Korean Women’s Art, a multi-venue touring exhibition featuring works by 18 Korean and Korean American women artist who use writing, language, and text-based practices as powerful means of expressing subjectivity and resisting entrenched gender and racial inequalities.

The exhibition kicks off with an opening talk on Oct. 2 where co-curators Jung-sil Lee and Koh Dong-Yeon will introduce the major themes as well as remarks from featured artists Jung Jungyeob and Ahn Okhyun.

Rooted in traditions historically shaped by patriarchy but often challenged by women—such as calligraphy (서예, seoye), classical poetry (한시, hansi) and literati painting (문인화, muninhwa)—this exhibition reclaims these artistic 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 expressions into text, the artists create transformative experiences for audiences. Their works question and transcend formal conventions, offering new perspectives and forging empowering narratives that reclaim space within a historically patriarchal artistic lineage.

This collaboratively organized exhibition spans three venues and features four interrelated subthemes. At the KCCDC the focus is on artists who pay homage to the legacy of visionary Korean American artist and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), expanding on themes central to her practice. Works by Kim Oksun, Ahn Okhyun, Yoon Jeongmee, and Jaye Rhee present a collaborative digital performance that re-reads and re-imagines Cha’s posthumous book Dictée.

Through media art, photography, and installation, these artists challenge the structural logics of language and culture, interrogating the hierarchies embedded within them. Drawing from embodied, diasporic, and feminist experiences, they disrupt fixed systems of meaning and propose new visual and textual grammars. Their practices reimagine "écriture" (the French word for writing) as fragmented, hybrid, and open-ended—resisting assimilation while opening space for multiplicity, uncertainty, and radical subjectivity.

Écriture with the Body gathers these diverse artistic practices into a collective exploration of how writing and the body intersect as tools of empowerment. Rather than offering singular resolutions, the exhibition embraces complexity and dissonance, inviting audiences to reflect on presence, identity, and the transformative power of language and the body.

Écriture with the Body: Contemporary Korean Women’s Art, curated by Dr. Jung-Sil Lee and Dr. Koh Dong-Yeon of Trio & Beats, and organized by the Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFICE) with support from Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, will remain on display at the KCCDC Oct. 3 through Nov. 12, 2025.

NOTE: doors open at 5pm and the artist/curator remarks begin at 6 pm!

Écriture with the Body: Contemporary Korean Women’s Art
Artist & Curator Talk: Thursday, October 2 (doors open 5 pm, remarks at 6pm)
KCCDC Dates: October 3 – November 12, 2025
Korean Cultural Center Washington, D.C. (2370 Massachusetts Ave. NW)

Additional Venues
Admission to all participating venues is free, but hours vary.

Corcoran School of the Arts and Design (details here)
500 17th St. NW, Washington D. C. 20006 (Gallery 225, second floor)
Oct. 3 – Nov. 15, 2025 (Wed. – Sat., 1 – 5 p.m.)
(202) 994-1700

IA&A at Hillyer (details here)
9 Hillyer Court, NW, Washington D. C. 20008
Oct. 3 – Nov. 2, 2025 (Tues. – Fri., 12 – 6 p.m. & Sat. – Sun. 12 – 5 p.m.)
(202) 338-0680

About the Exhibition Themes

The exhibition is divided into four thematic sections. Challenging Tradition: Contemporary Literati Painting and Calligraphy reinterprets the aesthetics of traditional literati painting, poetry, jeong-ga (정가) song, minhwa (민화) genre painting, and calligraphy through a contemporary feminist lens. Disturbing Language: Art and Women’s Poetry probes the intersection of visual art and women’s poetry as a site of disturbance and transformation, allowing poetry to become a visual and conceptual tool for reclaiming authorship and voice. Writing with the Body: Performance and Documentation transforms the body into both medium and message of resistance—a living text inscribed with memory, emotion, and defiance. Reimagining Écriture: The Legacy of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha collectively reimagines Cha’s legacy by engaging with the structural logic of language and its embedded hierarchies, reconfiguring écriture (writing) as fragmented, hybrid, and open-ended.

In total across three unique venues the exhibition features works by artists Seongnim Ahn, Yeesookyung, Kim Jipyeong, Minsun Oh Mun, Yun Suknam, Jung Jungyeob, Kook Dongwan, Hong Lee Hyunsook, Cho Youngjoo, Hyun Jung Kim, Jean Shin, Kim Oksun, Ahn Okhyun, Yoon Jeongmee, Jae Rhee, Su Kwak, Jean Jinho Kim, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

About the Curators

Dr. Jung-Sil Lee is an art historian, critic, and curator specializing in modern and contemporary art from a global perspective. Her research interests span global modernism, ritual theory, feminism, and public art, with a particular focus on narratives at the intersection of decolonization and feminism. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary Asian artists who challenge traditional artistic norms by incorporating traumatic histories into their works. As director of Trio & Beats and ArTrio, Dr. Lee has curated numerous exhibitions.

Dr. Dong-Yeon Koh (also known as Koh Dongyeon) is an art historian, curator, and critic specializing in postwar American art and contemporary Korean art. She is an adjunct professor at Ewha Womans University, Korea, and served as Artistic Director of the Gangwon International Triennale 2024. She has also served on the managing committee of the NaMAF (Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival, 2017–2021) and as commissioner of the Goyang Outdoor Sculpture Festival (2017–2018). Dr. Koh has published extensively on contemporary Korean art, with a focus on popular culture, gender theory, and memory studies. She is also co-author of Modern and Contemporary Korean Art and Culture in Context (1950–Now) (Bloomsbury, 2025), and co-director of Trio & Beats.

About the Artists & Images (featured at the KCCDC)

See images and text below.

Kim Oksun has for more than two decades focused her lens on the marginal people and landscapes that exist between displacement and settlement. Having personally experienced the process of relocating to Jeju Island, the artist has captured genre photographs that document the lives of outsiders, while also recording non-native plant species that, like these individuals, have taken root in Jeju’s unfamiliar soil. Drawing from her own experiences, Kim delicately explores how marginalized individuals—those with hybrid identities or the self-claimed names she refers to—employ a range of subtle strategies to adapt to society and their surroundings.

Kim has received several major photography awards in Korea, including the 2007 Park Geonhi Cultural Foundation Photography Award, the 2010 Seco Photo Award, the 2016 DongGang International Photo Award, and the Ilwoo Photography Award for Photographer of the Year in the publication category in 2017. Kim had exhibitions at MOMA PS1, Huston Museum of Art, CCP in Tuson, TOP Museum in Tokyo, Kaohsiung Museum of Art, Hong Kong Arts Center, Almaty Casteev State Art Museum, and in Korea at MMCA, SeMA, Leeum, and Atelier Hermès. Her works belong to the collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Jeju Municipal Museum, and Hanmi Museum of Photography, TOP museum, and Almaty Museum of Art.

Ahn Okhyun observes the inner dimensions of individual and collective consciousness through photography and video, exploring images of shared emotional states. She has held twelve solo exhibitions in Seoul, New York, and Stockholm, including Women Lead Men Toward the Sacred, Love Has No Name, The World Seen from the Summit of Everest, and Homo Sentimentalis. She has also participated in group exhibitions such as the 2018 Gwangju Biennale Imagined Borders. In addition to her artistic practice, she co-organized Chorus Dictee: Chorus, an exhibition and online performance reinterpreting Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s posthumous work Dictee, sponsored by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture.

Yoon Jeongmee’s photographs lie at the intersection of documentary and fine art photography, evoking the style of August Sander, a pioneer of German typological photography. With a realist approach, Yoon documents childhood through a cultural anthropological and gendered lens, utilizing socially assigned color codes. Among her best-known works is The Pink and Blue Project.

Yoon has held solo exhibitions in Seoul, New York, and Spain, showcasing pieces such as Zoo (Gallery Boda, 1999) and Natural History Museum (Gallery Boda, 2001). Her work has been featured on the covers of prominent publications such as LIFE magazine (2007), The New York Times (2008), The Telegraph (UK, 2008), and National Geographic (2017). Yoon is also a member of the collaborative project Dictee, which reinterprets the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Throughout her career, she has received numerous awards, including the Next Artist Award (2006), the Grand Prize at the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (Hong Kong, 2012), the Ilwoo Photography Award (Publication category, 2018), and the Donggang Photography Award (2023). Yoon’s works are part of the collections at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.

Jaye Rhee has explored the ruptures between sounds and images originating from different historical moments, as well as the various modes of playback and representation that surround them. By employing and juxtaposing diverse media such as photography, video, and performance, she presents a new poetic reality—one that is at once factual and immediate, yet dreamlike and rooted in imagination. Recently, she has particularly focused on facilitating encounters between Eastern and Western women whose voices were historically marginalized or silenced.

Rhee’s work has been exhibited at venues, including High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2018); Norton Museum of Art, Florida (2021); MCA Denver, Colorado (2023); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York (2011); Queens Museum, New York (2009); Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2005); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); Kobe Biennale (2007); Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; Seoul Museum of Art (2019, 2018); Center for Art & Architecture Affairs, Guimarães (2014); and La Triennale di Milano (2016). Her works are included in the public collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Asian Art Museum San Francisco, High Museum of Art, Norton Museum of Art, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Seoul Museum of Art, Gyeonggi Museum of Art, Koo House Museum of Art & Design, SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation, and Leeum Museum of Art.

Korean-born artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, from the mid-1970s until her death at age 31 in 1982, created a rich body of conceptual art that explored displacement and loss. Her works included artists' books, mail art, performance, audio, video, film, and installation. Although grounded in French psychoanalytic film theory, her art is also informed by far-ranging cultural and symbolic references, from shamanism to Confucianism and Catholicism. Cha's exploration of exile and dislocation in her art is informed by her own history. Uprooted during the Korean War, her family immigrated to America in 1962, moving first to Hawaii and then to San Francisco. After years in the Bay Area and time in Europe, Cha moved to New York City in 1980.

As an editor and writer at Tanam Press, she produced two well-known works, Dictée (1982) and Apparatus (1980), an important anthology of essays on the cinematic apparatus. From 1980 until her death in 1982, she was an editor and writer at Tanam Press in New York. Her work has been shown at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Artists Space, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Bronx Museum of Art, New York, among other venues. A major retrospective exhibition of her work, entitled The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) was organized by University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2001, and traveled to five cities, including Seoul, Korea. Text credit, above: Electronic Arts Intermix: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Biography.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Korean Cultural Center, Washington D.C., 2370 Massachusetts Avenue Northwest, Washington, United States