Queer art finds home in Seoul: Inside ‘Spectrosynthesis’ and collector's vision

Patrick Sun, executive director of Sunpride Foundation, poses with Oh In-hwan's "Where He Meets Him in Seoul" on the floor and Mark Bradford's "Nadir" behind him on the wall for "Spectrosynthesis: Seoul" at Art Sonje Center in Seoul, Sunday, during an interview with The Korea Times. Courtesy of Sunpride Foundation

Sunpride Foundation founder and executive director Patrick Sun likes to joke about his last name. But at Art Sonje Center in Seoul, he is doing more than beaming — he is shining light queer histories, long scattered and half-hidden in the city, helping them slowly come into public view.

Art Sonje Center is currently hosting “Spectrosynthesis Seoul,” the first large-scale institutional exhibition in Korea devoted to queer art, featuring works by 74 artists and collectives from Korea and beyond. The show is the fourth edition in Sunpride’s touring “Spectrosynthesis” series — following Taipei, Bangkok and Hong Kong — and brings together pieces from the foundation’s collection and new commissions to sketch a queer cartography of Seoul.

Blending “spectrum” and “synthesis” in its title, the exhibition invites multiple voices and perspectives on queer life to respond directly to the city’s shifting social and political landscape.

Curated by Art Sonje artistic director Kim Sun-jung and media culture scholar Lee Yong-woo, the show spills out from the main galleries into Art Sonje’s entire building — from the underground theater and corridors to the lobby, toilets and even the boiler room — weaving together video, installations, photography and painting into an immersive, lived-in environment that extends discourse on gender, sexuality and power into every corner of the space.

Art Sonje Center in Seoul holds the exhibition “Spectrosynthesis Seoul,” organized in collaboration with the Sunpride Foundation, in this March 18 photo. The show features LGBTQ+ art works by 74 artists and collectives. Newsis

Dedicated queer art advocate

Sun started out as a young collector in Hong Kong’s antique district in the late 1980s, moving from traditional Chinese paintings to contemporary Asian art as he became more involved in LGBTQ+ advocacy in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 2014, he brought those paths together by founding the Sunpride Foundation, with the belief that the core of queer art isn't about fixed sexual identity but the sharpened sensibility of living as a minority.

During an interview with The Korea Times last weekend, Sun said he is careful to frame his foundation as a guest, not a savior. Before deciding what to show, he and his team sat down in January with organizers of the Seoul Queer Culture Festival and other activists to listen to what local communities needed and feared.

“Rather than coming as an outsider, doing what we think is right, we need to listen to the local people and see what their views are, what the difficulties are or if we could help in any way,” he said.

Each city in the “Spectrosynthesis” circuit has brought its own legal and social urgencies: same-sex marriage debates in Taiwan, civil partnership in Thailand and free-speech battles in Hong Kong.

Witnessing changes in Korea

Compared with homophobic slogans that he saw more than a decade ago in Seoul, he said, today’s counter-protests — smaller, more contained and less overtly violent — indicate the Korean society is, slowly but noticeably, shifting toward greater tolerance.

The Seoul edition’s distinctiveness, in Sun’s eyes, lies in how unflinchingly it embraces the idea of queer culture as fragile and unfinished.

The works that moved him most in Seoul were those that seemed incomplete and precarious like Kim Tae-yeon's suspended ceramic forms and an installation by Choi Ha-neyl that look permanently in progress, with wires and partial bodies suspended mid-gesture.

Kim Tae-yeon's "Faces" (2024) / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center

Finding and working with Korean artists

“The queer history is never complete,” Sun noted. “It always exists in fragments of memories.”

That sense of vulnerability is also what drew him to younger Korean artists. “Everyone tells me Korea is very conservative, so I came with little expectation,” he admitted. Until recently, Sunpride collection was rich in Chinese, Taiwanese and Southeast Asian artists but thin on Korean voices.

Through Art Sonje’s curatorial team, who Sun praised for working hard to find and interview young artists, he discovered a new generation “very happy to participate,” even if they did not all identify publicly as queer. The point, he said, is not to organize artists by sexuality but to foreground issues and concepts that resonate beyond LGBTQ+ audiences.

From the Seoul show, Sunpride has added several Korean artists to its holdings.

Hah Ji-min’s “Felt out of joint as a girl” (2026), for instance, weaves protest scenes with traditional dance, placing queer bodies at the center of mass movements and cityscapes. Kim Jae-won’s “Home (2023) reads, in his account, like an eye-test apparatus framing a tiny house: a metaphor for a home that is visible yet out of reach, where “you see it and you don’t see it … you want it, you can’t get it.”

Yagwang's "O" (2026) / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center

He said through works of Yagwang, a young visual art collective duo who recently won the Frieze Artist Award, he learned to “embrace vulnerability, instability and incompleteness."

One of the most poignant stories he told involves painter Hur Ho, whose works line a basement corridor.

Worried about outing artists without their consent, Sun habitually asked whether they have come out to family, explaining that the foundation seeks to protect artists and also collects heterosexual artists who address queer themes. In Hur’s eyes, Sun said, the exhibition became a bridge. “He did not come out, but his father came to see the show and they were able to connect through this.”

Hur Ho's "Living, Leaving" (2023) / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center

Organizing LGBTQ+ art

For Sun, these individual moments are as important as the broader critical reception. He insists that queer-themed exhibitions must also meet “museum quality” standards to avoid tokenism.

“It’s not just because the artist is gay that we put his work up,” he said. “It has to be a good art and it has to withstand … the duration of time.”

The reception in Seoul has reassured him there is an appetite and an audience for that level of rigor. He cited “very positive” local press reviews, long queues on opening day and steady visitor traffic. In a city where LGBTQ+ issues are often framed as marginal or controversial, a major museum devoting three floors entirely to queer art — and filling them with visitors — marks a significant shift.

Still, Sun is wary of overstating what one exhibition can do.

“I don’t think any single person, single event, single exhibition can change the world,” he said. “It doesn’t happen that way.”

Instead, he pictures a landscape where activists fight legal battles, filmmakers tell queer stories, writers and novelists expand the imagination and curators build platforms. “Everyone has a part to play … and sometimes the world changes very quickly,” he said, referring to what he saw in Singapore where homosexuality was decriminalized only recently.

Asked what message he has for Korean artists and curators working on queer issues, Sun pointed to Sin Wai Kin’s “ESSENCE (6 Sheet),” a monumental fragrance-ad pastiche installed on the exterior of the building. The bottles on display are empty; the slogan reads, “Your true self awaits.”

Installation view of Sin Wai Kin's "ESSENCE (6 Sheet)" (2024) at Spectrosynthesis Seoul at Art Sonje Center in Seoul / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center

“One should not only rely on outside things to enhance, to make ourselves a better person,” he said. “We should really … stay true to yourself. If you don’t believe in what you do, no matter how commercially successful you are, it’s empty.”

Beyond Seoul

Sunpride’s work will continue beyond Seoul. The foundation is supporting “Queer Art Thailand,” a smaller but related show at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre this summer, and is preparing the next “Spectrosynthesis” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, set to open in February 2027.

Sun’s long game is, paradoxically, to make his own collection obsolete.

People sometimes ask whether he's ever worried about his role as queer art collector supporter going nowhere, once LGBTQ+ rights advance.

“My immediate reaction was that I cannot wait for that to happen,” he said, laughing, “Who cares if my collection is no longer of value? I just want the world to be better then everybody can be true to themselves.”

Participants march near Euljiro 1-ga Station in central Seoul during this year's Seoul Queer Culture Festival, Saturday. Yonhap