Kang Seung Lee Briefly Gorgeous Gallery Hyundai, Seoul 17 November – 31 December Visibility is central to the multidisciplinary art practice of Kang Seung Lee, who sensitively and insistently foregrounds queer stories that have been marginalised in mainstream historical discourse. Working primarily in drawing – as well as embroidery, installation, video and collage – Lee adopts a documentary approach by preserving and perpetuating the labours of queer artists and activists such as David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, Peter Hujar, Alvin Baltrop and Derek Jarman, all of whom refused to accept the dismissal of their struggles by dominant heteronormative cultural narratives. Such figures loom large in Lee’s oeuvre, which engages dialectics of presence and absence to promote a more acute awareness
of minoritarian perspectives amid the conservative milieux that have long sought to render them invisible. In Briefly Gorgeous, Lee invokes the individual stories of choreographer Goh Choo San and photographer Tseng Kwong Chi, queer artists of Asian descent who succumbed to aids-related illnesses while living in New York during the 1980s and 90s, respectively. Lee meticulously recreates photographic portraits of these protagonists using graphite on paper before erasing each image’s central figure, leaving behind a ghostly, liminal presence devoid of any distinguishing details. In Lee’s drawings of Goh, only the choreographer’s hands are discernible, while the rest of his body
is reduced to shimmering wisps of vapour; the same treatment applies to drawings of Tseng, which are based on the photographer’s acclaimed performative self-portrait series East Meets West (1979–89). Before his untimely death in 1990, Tseng also amassed a prolific photographic archive documenting New York’s downtown art scene, from which Lee procured a 1980 Polaroid photo of Shawn McQuate, then a nineteen-year-old dancer and regular at the legendary Club 57 in Manhattan’s East Village. It is an image of a barefoot teenager posing in profile, wearing a black jacket accented with voluminous white tulle that envelops his slender shoulders, and confidently gazing directly at the viewer with
Untitled (Shawn McQuate 3), 2021, graphite on paper, 48 × 33 cm. Courtesy the artist
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a look of fierce vivacity and youthful invincibility. Today, Tseng’s photo reads as a celebration of what it was to be young and gay in the halcyon days before the aids pandemic ravaged the queer community, eventually claiming the lives of nearly everyone from McQuate’s Club 57 cohort. On the gallery’s exterior, Lee enlarges two drawings of McQuate to create a largescale vinyl-banner diptych (Banner Project, 2021): one image faithfully recreates Tseng’s photo, but in the second image McQuate’s legs and face have been erased so that his body seems to be disappearing. Within the gallery, an original Xeroxed print of Tseng’s Polaroid (Untitled, 1980) is paired with a short singlechannel video (Untitled (Shawn McQuate), 2021) that replaces the lithe figure from the photo with the sixty-year-old McQuate of the present. In this brief performance, he attempts to hold the same pose while wearing a reproduced version of the jacket from some four decades
years prior. It’s a feat of considerable effort for McQuate, who suffers from hiv-related blindness; while his body may be physically present, the visible world around him has already dissolved into oblivion, a cruel irony underscored by Lee’s drawing methodology. Prevailing themes of absence and loss in Briefly Gorgeous are reified in a minimal installation that transforms the gallery’s basement into a lonely nightclub. Scattered around the perimeter of Lee’s imagined gay club are several pieces by contemporary Korean artist Haneyl Choi, whose works visualise the complexities of queer code-switching in Korea’s conservative social milieu. For this exhibition, Choi contributes sculptures of disembodied limbs – an arm covered in multiple rainbow tattoos with an led microphone clutched in its hand; or a leg with men’s underwear wrapped around its ankle and a black, puppy-dog bdsm mask perched atop its thigh – that resonate with
the bodily erasure characteristic of Lee’s drawings. These bodies, too, are in the process of disappearing. Their symbolism as the last remaining patrons surrounding an empty dancefloor is haunting in its layered references to Tseng, Goh and the countless others lost to the aids pandemic. And yet the music keeps on playing. The soundtrack to Briefly Gorgeous, which blasts from speakers in the basement and echoes throughout Gallery Hyundai’s various exhibition spaces, was compiled by eight queer Korean artists whom Lee invited to create playlists for the occasion. By asserting control over the music selection, they forge a sense of agency that claims the club as a space of empowerment in an act of solidarity with previous generations of queer creatives and activists, ensuring that their stories are honoured and remembered for the brilliant beauty of their protagonists simply living their truth, against all odds. Andy St. Louis
Untitled (Shawn McQuate) (still), 2021, single-channel hd video (colour, silent), 2 min 24 sec. Courtesy the artist
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