INTERVIEW Skin-crawling eroticism of TZUSOO's art

TZUSOO's "living" sculpture "Agarmon 5," made of agar and moss, is on view at Seoul's National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art for her solo exhibition titled "Agarmon Encyclopedia: Leaked Edition." Courtesy of MMCA

By Park Han-sol

• Published Aug 21, 2025 7:00 AM KST
• Updated Aug 21, 2025 2:00 PM KST

We live in a world where reproduction is no longer seen as a universal imperative — that ancient, once-inescapable facet of human life. Yet bodies continue to seek one another, not for the grand duty of propagation, but for the fleeting intoxication of pleasure.

This surge of sexual energy, now freer than ever from the burden of creation, stirred a question for artist TZUSOO: what becomes of that sudden burst at the peak of ecstasy if it does not culminate in new life? Does it simply dissolve into nothing?

Not quite, says the 33-year-old, gesturing toward a bizarre life form of her own making: a moist, fleshy mass the size of a cantaloupe.

Evocative of both a half-formed embryo and a phallus, it is as grotesque as it is strangely tender — a tension echoed in its very name, “Agarmon,” a fusion of “agar” (phonetically “baby” in Korean) and “monster.”

The “agar” also refers to the gelatinous organic material that makes up its moss-covered body, giving the creature an otherworldly resemblance to a newborn. In fact, its life can only be sustained in a carefully calibrated incubator, balancing water, humidity and light. And over time, it ages and decays, in a gradual rhythm much like that of its human carers.

“In the mythos I’ve imagined, Agarmons are born in a distant universe at the moment of every human orgasm,” the artist playfully told The Korea Times at Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), where her “Agarmon 5” now makes its home.

But as more and more orgasms occur for pleasure alone, without fertilization, that otherworld has grown overcrowded. The creatures have begun to slip into Earth through mysterious fissures. To keep them alive as specimens, the fictional Agarmon Institute started building incubators, like the cold steel womb now standing at the MMCA.

“Across the long history of humanity, the time when women’s bodies were not bound to childbirth is vanishingly brief,” she continued. “For millennia, our ancestors risked their lives to pass down their DNA. And now, for the first time, our generation decides whether to reproduce at all. That struck me as profound.”

Agarmon embodies that seismic shift in flesh — women’s sexual desire freed from pregnancy, laid bare in unapologetically raw and grotesque truth.

But the creature also reveals something more intimate: the artist’s own quiet longing for motherhood, at odds with her physical reality.

“Ever since I was little, I wanted to be both a mother and a full-time artist,” she said. But once she started her career, she soon realized that possibility was out the window.

“I was already pouring every bit of myself into my art every day. By the time I hit 30, my body began to give out from hours and hours spent in front of the computer.”

Instead of physically giving birth herself, she began conjuring alternative beings that demanded her care, from “Schrodinger’s Baby” (2019-20), a digital life that grows from embryo to fetus, to the tactile, quasi-alive “Agarmon” (2023-).

Whether virtual or embodied, these creations all throb with TZUSOO’s signature style, where the erotic collides with the philosophical in cheeky, ultramodern provocation.

And it is this audacious approach, shaped by a hyperdigital upbringing and an intimacy with the currents of internet subculture, that has made her the youngest artist ever to stage a solo exhibition at Korea’s state-run contemporary museum. Her “Agarmon Encyclopedia: Leaked Edition” inaugurates the MMCA X LG OLED project series, bringing her latest uncanny visions into full bloom.

Occupying the center of the museum’s lofty Seoul Box plaza is “Agarmon 5.” Around the sculpture and its water-spouting incubator stand two hyper-crisp digital installations: “The Eight Spirits of Flesh.”

Like “Agarmon,” these onscreen spirits — “Tae,” a specter of sexually transmitted diseases, and “Gan,” a wandering spirit of confused sexual identity — exude a primal intensity. Their mucus-slicked surfaces shimmer, while wiry hairs writhe in tandem with hypnotic music.

Through these unabashedly confrontational works, TZUSOO opens a visceral dialogue within the museum about female desire, sexuality and the body.

“All my life, wandering through museums and living among art, I noticed how rarely the female erotic gaze is truly represented. I wanted sexuality to be explored in many languages and forms, beyond the cliched tropes of flowers or nudes,” she explained.

“I realized that baring my most intimate stories could help widen that spectrum. My work often carries my own fetishes — veins pulsing beneath the skin, the gleaming piercings. At the same time, sexuality is never just polished, glossy and beautiful. It’s messy, full of fear, disease and scars. That complexity is what I wanted to reveal.”

And to her surprise, since the opening of her Seoul show on Aug. 1, children and young visitors have been utterly captivated.

She has overheard preschoolers describe the spirit as “a snail meeting a new friend,” while elementary school students saw echoes of their favorite Pokemon.

“It struck me that taboos around sexuality live mostly in the minds of grown-ups, really,” she reflected with a smile. “Children approach art through their own language of the world.”

Another revelation has been how quickly “Agarmon 5” in Seoul is “aging,” compared to its four predecessors that were placed in bunkers and former salt mines of Germany and Romania.

“Through the incubator, we try to maintain humidity and light at their optimal levels,” she noted. “But what lies beyond our control is the microclimate, which is shaped by shifting elements like the breath of an air conditioner or the number of visitors passing by.”

“And yet, that process itself is part of the exhibition. Our task is simply to watch, record, and observe as Agarmon grows old.”

As an artist moving fluidly across media — printmaking, painting, 3D graphics, game engines and artificial intelligence — she refuses to confine herself to a single form, so long as each can fully convey her aesthetic truth.

“People often assume digital media makes artmaking easy, almost effortless. But the more accessible the tool, the more uniform its expressions tend to be,” she said.

For TZUSOO, digital creation is no different from painting; just as a painter spends years honing a style with a single brush, she wrestles daily with mouse and keyboard, straining to translate her imagined visions onscreen without loss. Sleepless nights are simply the price of that fidelity.

The result we see is her unmistakable signature: images at once skin-crawling and hair-raising, yet also crisp, seductive and strangely luminous.

It was this philosophy that drew her early to AI, most notably in “Dalle’s Aimy” (2022-24). But these days, she keeps her distance.

At first, she was simply curious, wanting to see how AI would interpret Aimy, a character she had sculpted painstakingly by digital hand, if given nothing but a handful of text prompts. The results startled her.

“The images were unruly, playful, defiantly un-human. I was fascinated.”

But the intrigue did not last. “As it grew more polished, it also grew dull, churning out images that felt ordinary, predictable. The strangeness I loved had vanished.”

For her, the question is not whether a human or a machine has made the work, but whether the story insists on being told.

“In my video works, for example, I know with certainty that what I’m making is something AI cannot achieve,” she said. “If AI can handle certain tasks better, then let it. My responsibility is to push my imagination into places only I can reach.”

Her Seoul exhibition, she notes, embodies precisely that conviction: an aesthetic that AI cannot yet touch.

And she’s right.

“Agarmon Encyclopedia: Leaked Edition” is on display at MMCA Seoul through Feb. 1, 2026.