All the artists in this exhibition incorporate text within their works. When considering Korean women artists who appropriate language and script as a creative strategy, one must first note their oppositional stance toward the tradition of muninhwa (literati painting) in Joseon. For instance, Ahn Sungmin and Minsun Oh Mun reinterpret minhwa’s munjado (pictorial ideographs) and genre paintings from a feminist perspective, disrupting patriarchal structures in the process. Such practices, as Michel Foucault observed, resist the male-centered power systems that have controlled history and society by controlling writing itself. At the same time, these artists expand Hélène Cixous’s notion of écriture féminine—disrupting conventional narrative orders through the convergence of language and image, making visible suppressed female experiences and voices, and opening possibilities for new, self-determined forms of storytelling.  Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work anticipates this very trajectory. In Dictee, her deconstructive juxtapositions of language and image, poetry and prose, historical record and personal narrative exemplify how text can be mobilized to subvert the dominant order of language and to seek new structures of storytelling. Su Kwak, Jean Jinho Kim, Hyung Jung Kim, and Jung Jungyeob likewise enact their own forms of écriture feminine.

Dr. Jung-Sil Lee is an art historian, critic, and curator specializing in modern and contemporary art from a global perspective. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary Asian artists who challenge traditional artistic norms by incorporating traumatic histories into their works. Dr. Lee’s recent publications include “Soaring (Narsha): Korean American Artists” (Asian Pacific Journal, August 2025), which reflects her curatorial vision for her exhibition at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, and “Colonized Bodies: Intersectional Women’s Movements of Korea and the Korean Diaspora in the U.S.” (Women’s History Review, May 2025). She has also co-authored the textbook Modern and Contemporary Korean Art and Culture in Context (1950-Now) (Bloomsbury, 2025), developed from her pioneering course “Modern and Contemporary Korean Art and Culture” at George Washington University. As director of Trio & Beats and ArTrio, Dr. Lee has curated numerous exhibitions, including Collateral Damage, Truth: Promise for Peace, and Bio Art.

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, and served as Artistic Director of the Gangwon International Triennale 2024. She has 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). She has published extensively on contemporary Korean art in leading journals including The Inter-Asia Journal of Cultural Studies, Flash Art, Modern Art Asia, Photography and Culture, and Positions. Her publications include “The Paradoxical Place of the Female Body in Feminist Arts in South Korea” in Korean Art from 1953 (Phaidon Press, 2020, ed. Chung Yeonshim et al.), and The Korean War and Postmemory Generation: Korean Contemporary Art and Film (Routledge, 2021). She is also co-author of Modern and Contemporary Korean Art and Culture in Context (1950–Now) (Bloomsbury, 2025).

1. Jung Jungyeob

Jung Jungyeob has been a leading feminist artist and activist in Korea, foregrounding issues such as women’s economic status, everyday life, ecology, and nuclear contamination for the last four decades. She initially gained recognition for her socialist realist paintings, and since the early 1990s, has explored connections between women, nature, and critical awareness in daily life, often using themes of beans and ecology. She collects everyday objects historically used by ordinary women during Korea’s modernization period, as well as inscriptions and meanings embedded in them. She has collaborated with a wide range of feminist artists, theorists, and activists incorporating lines from poems by the renowned Korean feminist poet Kim Hyesoon into her work. Her efforts toward gender equality in the cultural sphere have been recognized with several major awards, including the 2018 Goam Art Prize, the 2020 Gender Equality Culture Award, and the 2022 Lee Jung Seop Art Award. Her paintings and installations are held in major institutions such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), the Seoul Museum of Art, the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

2. Su Kwak

Su Kwak is a Korean American artist who explores the spiritual meaning of light and its healing qualities in her work. Early on, Kwak depicted abstract landscapes from her childhood memories. Gradually, her search led her to depict the spiritual qualities of light in a manner that incorporated spiritual writings. This began with pasting her mother’s old Korean bible pages on her canvas. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including a traveling retrospective at the Brauer Museum of Art and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Kwak’s works are held in the permanent collections in the US of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Brauer Museum of Art. In Korea, her works are included in permanent collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Seoul Museum of Art, and the Busan Museum of Art.

3. Jean Jinho Kim

Jean Jinho Kim explores themes of resilience, femininity, and adversity through sculptural forms that fuse dynamic movement with symbolic strength. Originally trained as a painter, she shifted her focus to large-scale public art during the pandemic, drawn to the accessibility and community engagement of outdoor installations. Working primarily in aluminum, steel, and stainless steel, Kim embraces the durability and clarity of these materials to create structures that embody both tension and balance. Color is central to her practice: bold hues and stark contrasts evoke joy, contemplation, and emotional nuance. In parallel with her sculptural work, Kim continues to paint, often using a restrained palette, collage, and tape techniques to investigate volume and abstraction. She has participated in artist residencies in Berlin, Germany, and Seravezza, Italy, and her work has been exhibited internationally, including in the U.S., Germany, Italy, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Kim is an active member of the Washington Sculptors Group and Han-Mee Artists Association.

4. Ahn Sungmin

Ahn Seongmin has developed her careers in both the United States and South Korea for the last three decades. She begins working with traditional forms and themes, which she then extends into multi-disciplinary and multi-media practices by adopting science, technology, and diverse cognitive models. She has exhibited works at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, the Charles Wang Center at Stony Brook University, and the Hello Museum (Seoul). She is the recipient of Pollock Krasner Foundation, CUE Art Foundation, AHL Foundation, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and etc. Her work has been acquired by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea, Princeton University Art Museum, Hudson River Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Her work has been reviewed in The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun, The Plain Dealer and others.

5. Minsun Oh Mun

Minsun Oh Mun explores integrated styles of Korean ink painting and minwha (folk art) in the framework of contemporary art. As a Korean American artist, Mun explores her own contemporary Eastern art by incorporating Korean sentiments and her own exposure to American culture, that led her works often integrate letters and symbolic characters as a signifier of Korean artistic elements and cultural identity. Mun received the “Special Artist Award” selected by the jury of the Korean Art Critics Association in 2020 and won first place in the NPO WCCW Art juried competition in 2015. Her artistic activities include Art Forum International Exhibition at Hainan, China (2024), a Minwha Truck Show at the Freer & Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Asian Art Museum (2017), exhibition Collateral Damage at the ANYA and Andrew Shiva Gallery in John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (2016) and American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center (2025).

6. Hyung Jung Kim

Hyun Jung Kim has held exhibitions across the globe, including the United States, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Europe. Kim asks the ontological question of human being’s value and humanity in contemporary society. She makes wearable sculptures for interactive projects with the public to remind them of their values, or panels with words or sentences related to subjects of interest. As her visual language, she developed the idea to use the dots and codes of braille to deliver meanings in language form and create a visually decorative and abstract look. Kim’s human rights themed works were recognized and invited for a solo exhibition, “Blind in Art - ONE,” at the Woman’s National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C., and her work has been added to the collections of the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations in NYC, the City of Riverside in California, Capital One headquarters in Richmond, NOVA AAPI Intercultural Center in Virginia. Kim has a studio at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in the United States.

7. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

From the mid-1970s until her death at age 31 in 1982, Korean-born artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 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. She produced two well-known works, Dictée (1982) and Apparatus (1980), an important anthology of essays on the cinematic apparatus. 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.