“Liminal Figures,” an English-language anthology featuring interviews with 15 artists and collectives working across changing cultural, geographic, and linguistic contexts, has been published.
 
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.
 
The participating artists represent a broad range of migratory experiences and affiliations, including Korean artists working internationally, diasporic Korean artists, artists engaging questions of Korean identity and cultural belonging, and a North Korean defector artist.

Rather than grouping these artists under a singular identity category, the publication foregrounds how each practice negotiates different relationships to language, migration, rupture, memory, and institutional structures through distinct artistic vocabularies and methodologies.
 
The publication is co-authored by Hyunjoo Byeon and Je Yun Moon, who developed the project through sustained written dialogues with artists whose practices most compellingly inhabit unstable and transitional positions.
 
Through these exchanges, the authors explore how experiences of displacement and boundary-crossing shape perception, language, materiality, and narrative form within contemporary art.
 
The collaboration with GYOPO further broadens this perspective by approaching diaspora not as a singular narrative or unified identity, but as a complex and layered spectrum shaped by different migration histories, cultural contexts, ruptures, and possibilities.

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.
 
While “K-Artists” questioned the collective classification of “Korean art” and the construction of Korean identity through conversations with a younger generation of artists, “Liminal Figures” expands this inquiry toward liminality itself: not as a stable identity, but as a shifting condition continuously shaped through movement, translation, contradiction, and coexistence.
 
In this sense, the publication is more than an anthology of interviews. It offers a critical record of how contemporary diasporic Korean artists connect language, culture, history, and place to produce new artistic forms and experiences.
 
At the same time, it questions conventional frameworks that classify artists according to nationality or identity, opening toward expanded understandings of Korean-ness and the possibilities that exist beyond it.
 
“Liminal Figures” will be launched across three cities: Seoul (June 24), Los Angeles (June 27), and Berlin (September 12).

References

• 더플로어플랜 보도자료 (The Floorplan Press Release)