Tuesday-Saturday 11:00~19:00 / Closed on Sunday, Monday
DOOSAN Gallery: 15, Jongno 33-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea
Tel. 02-708-5050
DOOSAN Art Center DOOSAN Gallery is pleased to present DOOSAN Humanities Theater 2026 Special Exhibition The Multilingual, from June 24th(Wed.) to August 1st(Sat.). DOOSAN Humanities Theater is an annual program that brings together scientific, humanistic, and artistic imagination, inviting audiences to reflect on fundamental questions about the society we live in today from diverse perspectives. In 2026, under the theme “New Taxonomy,” the program features three performing arts, one exhibition, and eight lectures.
The Multilingual questions the conventional systems of classification through which human beings are defined—such as nationality, gender, language, and age—and seeks to understand humanity as something complex and ever-changing. The exhibition takes its title and point of departure from the life of a real individual who lived through some of the most turbulent moments of modern Korean history. Born in North Korea in 1930, she experienced Japanese colonial rule and the Korean War, fled to South Korea, later immigrated to the United States, and eventually returned to Korea. In the final stage of her life, as she underwent cognitive changes, she began speaking in a mixture of Japanese, English, and Korean. Human beings, like her, are not fixed entities but fluid existences that are continuously formed and rewritten through long histories, memories, and experiences from birth until death. By what taxonomy, then, can such an enigmatic being be defined?
Through their distinctive visual languages—including indirect ways of seeing, misunderstanding, abstraction, speaking simultaneously, layering, and concealing—the participating artists, Gim Ikhyun, IM Youngzoo, Chung Seoyoung, and Choey Eun Young Cho, propose alternative ways of understanding that move beyond fixed modes of classification. Working across sculpture, photography, video, and sound, the artists approach mutable portraits that are continually shaped and reshaped through temporal disjunctions, misalignments, and gaps.
* The exhibition will be specially open from 3 to 7:30 pm on Monday, June 29th, on the occasion of DOOSAN Humanities Theater lecture.
Curated by Hyejung Jang│Assisted by Jinyoung You, Jungmin Lee, Bomi Jang, Jihee Jun, Seohui Hong
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