A Show Highlighting Emerging Korean Artists Probes Diasporic Tensions

‘Contours of Zero: Emerging Korean Artists in New York’ arrives at a moment when the visibility of Korean contemporary art in the US is being renegotiated across cultural, political and economic fronts. Korean cultural presence abroad has expanded noticeably in recent years, yet emerging Korean artists remain unevenly visible in the US, often routed through the broad category of ‘K-culture’ rather than recognized within contemporary art histories. Space ZeroOne, a new gallery with an emphasis on Korean art, has mindfully entered the fray. At a time when cultural exchange carries added symbolic weight amid US–Korea tension and tightening visa policies, the institution’s invocation of ‘zero’ suggests an open beginning with generative potential.

Of course, intentions alone cannot orient a new venue in a saturated field of emerging artist programming. The exhibition is strongest when individual practices distil the dynamics that shape contemporary life: communication faltering under pressure, the fact of materiality itself in flux, the conditioning of attention by transnational experience. Many of the participating artists work across cities and countries (New York, Seoul, London, Copenhagen), a mobility that the exhibition registers as lived experience rather than thematic prompt. As a pragmatic introduction rather than a thesis, the exhibition sketches the outline of a curatorial vision; the works themselves point to where it might sharpen.

Among the New York-based artists, Jeenho Seo articulates this tension with visceral precision. Using thermoplastic mouthpieces cast directly from his own mouth and embedded with popcorn, rice, seaweed and tea powder, Seo turns the acts of eating and speaking into sculptural meditations on breakdowns in communication. In depends (2022), conceived amid the heated climate of pandemic-era identity politics, the artist confronts the paralysis of self-censorship – the sense that language might betray him before it reaches its audience. The hardened negatives of his oral cavity become relics of words withheld. Because the plastic softens in heat and stiffens when cold, the work captures the volatility of translation itself: language as something that shifts with tone, temperature and context. As viewers rotate a small box, the pieces within can shift or lightly fracture, making the fragility of articulation physically felt. Seo transforms silence into a resistant form, evoking diasporic precarity at the molecular level.

A comparable tension animates Khia Hong’s Doubt (2025), made on-site and positioned against the gallery’s glass facade in direct response to the architecture and the city beyond it. Composed of tangled wires, acrylic and PVC sheets, cardboard and USB cables, the assemblage hovers between construction and collapse. Several white, plaster-like bundles – reminiscent of medical bandages or improvised clinical supports – lend the work a bodily register, mirroring the emotional flux that can accompany diasporic life in New York. What appears fractured is not broken: Hong frames these entanglements as openings into alternate perceptual states, closer to quantum variability, where fragility becomes a generative structure rather than a flaw.

Impermanence is front and centre in Jungki Baek’s is of Dumulmeori 2024-1 (2025), a photograph printed with pigments extracted from fallen leaves and sealed within oxygen-free acrylic chambers. The intensive scientific process behind the work’s creation – grinding leaves into dye, stabilizing their hues in controlled environments – takes on a devotional character. The image documents both an act of preservation and that act’s inevitable failure; natural colour becomes a chronicle of disappearance. The show closes quietly, with Min Jung Song’s Scene (2022): a smartphone video accompanied by faint breezes from nearby fans. Its drifting narration and looping, endless rain evoke the rhythm of fleeting time: memory experienced as weather, endlessly returning yet never quite the same. The installation invites solitary viewing, offering a rare pause for reflection amid a dense show where artists navigate, from so many angles, the frictions of language, material and place.

‘Contours of Zero: Emerging Korean Artists in New York’ is on view at Space ZeroOne, New York until 20 December

^{Main image: ‘Contours of Zero: Emerging Korean Artists in New York’ , 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Space ZeroOne; photograph: Charlie Rubin}