Liminal Figures
1st Edition
Published on 5. June 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
372 pages
978-3-00-087108-5 (ISBN)
Description
Liminal Figures is an anthology of interviews with fifteen artists and collectives whose practices unfold across shifting cultural, geographic, and linguistic contexts. Co-published by GYOPO and The Floorplan, the publication examines how a generation of artists born in the 1980s and 1990s works within conditions of movement, translation, and multiple forms of belonging. Featured artists include Jesse Chun, Johanna Hedva, Skye Jin, Lotus L. Kang, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, YoungEun Kim, HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander, Heesoo Kwon, Hyeok Lee, Jeewi Lee, Maia Ruth Lee, Na Mira, Gala Porras-Kim, TJ Shin, and Rachel Youn.
Developed as a continuation of the inquiry begun with K-Artists (2023)-the first English-language anthology of interviews with forty-seven emerging Korean artists-Liminal Figures does not seek to extend or reinforce a categorical frame. Instead, it moves away from fixed identifiers to examine how in-between conditions are lived, negotiated, and produced through artistic practice.
The publication is co-authored by Hyunjoo Byeon and Je Yun Moon, who developed this project through sustained dialogue with a younger generation of diasporic Korean artists whose practices most compellingly inhabit and work through unstable positions. The collaboration with GYOPO further expands this perspective, approaching diaspora not as a singular narrative, but as a range of lived conditions shaped by migration, rupture, and possibility.
Structured through conversations conducted between 2024 and 2026, the book treats dialogue as a site where these tensions remain active. Rather than smoothing over differences, the exchanges allow hesitation, elaboration, and partial articulation to remain visible, rather than resolved. What emerges is a process marked by moments of insight as well as ellipses-where translation is never complete, and where understanding is provisional.
Across the publication, in the artists' respective practices, language appears as contested terrain, material as something that shifts and degrades, and institutions as frameworks that organize and constrain visibility and knowledge. Other practices extend toward speculative or cosmological registers that displace human-centered perspectives, or work through sound, narrative, and text as fluid structures for thinking through displacement and history.
The publication opens with a foreword by GYOPO and concludes with a text by Diana SeoHyung that moves between poetry, epistolary address, and family history, extending the artists' conversations into personal reflections on intimacy, language, and migration.
Rather than presenting a unified framework, Liminal Figures sustains a set of contingent and relational positions as open questions. Liminality here is not a fixed condition or identity, but a mode of working-one that is continuously produced, negotiated, and reconfigured. In this sense, the book positions conversation not simply as documentation, but as a method for engaging the complexities of contemporary artistic practice.
More details
Persons
Author
Curator
Hyunjoo Byeon (b. 1980) is an independent curator, writer, and publisher based in Berlin and Seoul. She is the co-founder and director of The Floorplan, a curatorial and publishing platform. Her practice takes the curatorial as a mode of research into how art is framed and institutionalized, with writing and publishing as integral extensions of that inquiry. She is the co-author and publisher of K-Artists (Archive Books & The Floorplan, 2023), an anthology of artist interviews that address questions of identity, categorization, and belonging. She has also co-authored Curating Research (Open Editions & de Appel, 2014), and translated The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (MIT Press, 2012) and Curating Subjects (Open Editions, 2007) into Korean. Byeon writes regularly on contemporary art, contributing to various publications and magazines including a monthly column for arte.co.kr. She previously worked at Esther Schipper in Berlin, and at Kukje Gallery and Art Sonje Center in Seoul. As an independent curator, she has curated exhibitions and projects at institutions including Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Alternative Space Loop, Seoul; and galleries such as KÖNIG Telegraphenamt, Berlin, and VSF, Los Angeles. Byeon holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London, and BAs in Business Administration and Art History from Ewha Womans University, Seoul.
Hyunjoo Byeon (b. 1980) is an independent curator, writer, and publisher based in Berlin and Seoul. She is the co-founder and director of The Floorplan, a curatorial and publishing platform. Her practice takes the curatorial as a mode of research into how art is framed and institutionalized, with writing and publishing as integral extensions of that inquiry. She is the co-author and publisher of K-Artists (Archive Books & The Floorplan, 2023), an anthology of artist interviews that address questions of identity, categorization, and belonging. She has also co-authored Curating Research (Open Editions & de Appel, 2014), and translated The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (MIT Press, 2012) and Curating Subjects (Open Editions, 2007) into Korean. Byeon writes regularly on contemporary art, contributing to various publications and magazines including a monthly column for arte.co.kr. She previously worked at Esther Schipper in Berlin, and at Kukje Gallery and Art Sonje Center in Seoul. As an independent curator, she has curated exhibitions and projects at institutions including Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Alternative Space Loop, Seoul; and galleries such as KÖNIG Telegraphenamt, Berlin, and VSF, Los Angeles. Byeon holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London, and BAs in Business Administration and Art History from Ewha Womans University, Seoul.
Dr. Je Yun Moon (b.1978) is a Seoul-based curator and writer whose work explores the limits of the body and its intricate relationship with language. Her recent research delves into the performative power of poetic expression, addressing generational trauma and amnesia. Her recent curatorial project, Tongue of Rain at Art Sonje Center (2024), was part of this research and inspired by the layered dialogue between feminist poets Cecilia Vicuña, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Kim Eon Hee. At Frieze Seoul 2024, her performance program ?·?(??) - Nerve or Divine Pathway was also an attempt to create a ritual space, challenging our time where language is hijacked by radical politics. Dr. Moon has served as Deputy Director at Art Sonje Center and has also held curatorial roles at the Nam June Paik Art Center, the Korean Cultural Centre UK, and the Liverpool Biennial. Her doctoral thesis, Choreo-graphy: The Deinstitutionalisation of the Body and the Event of Writing, completed at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2017, examines the intersection of exhibition-making and dance through choreography as a conceptual tool in curatorial practices. She has curated solo exhibitions for artists including Lee Bul, Sora Kim, Koo Jeong A, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Heidi Bucher, and Ho Tzu Nyen, and recently co-curated the Korean video art exhibition at MASI Lugano, exploring moving image as a site where history, technological imaginaries, and performative staging converge.
Editor-in-chief
Kavior Moon (b. 1983) is an art historian, critic, and educator living in Los Angeles; she is also Editor at GYOPO. Her research and teaching have covered a wide range of topics in relation to contemporary art, including architecture and exhibition design, conceptualism, institutional critique, materiality, identity politics, and ecology. From 2016-22, she was Liberal Arts Faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where she also served as a Segment Producer and Story Editor for the school's online platform, the SCI-Arc Channel. She has taught at UCLA, UC Irvine, ArtCenter College of Design, and Claremont Graduate University. Her essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Kaleidoscope, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. She received a B.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from UCLA.