Apexart presents 나쁜 (애)도 / Bad Lament, an art exhibition curated by Minseon Kim and Sam Blumenfeld. It will be on view from Sep. 13 – Oct. 11, 2025, from 1:00 pm – 9:00 pm (Closed Tuesdays) at Garage Under Construction, B1, 23, Samgaksan-ro 34-gil, Gangbuk-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
The opening reception will hold on September 13th, 2025 from 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm. The group exhibition will feature works by Zozo – Ru Kim – On Lee – Black Jaguar – Jun!yi Min – Camila Pizarro – Soeun Bae K Rawald – Jungsik Lee + Hyoungju Kim
On October 29, 2022, a small queer cultural festival in Seoul brought neighbors and queer youth together in brief but joyous celebration. Hours later, the Itaewon Halloween crowd crush claimed 159 lives—many from the same communities who had just danced in the streets. The tragedy revealed deep inequities in public mourning. Despite Itaewon’s identity as a queer hub, official narratives omitted LGBTQ+ victims. No names, no faces—just anonymous statistics.
This erasure echoes a longer history of state neglect: from the Jeju Massacre (1948) to the Sewol Ferry Disaster (2014), grief has been managed to protect dominant narratives, excluding the marginalized from collective memory. Globally, systems of power determine whose deaths are grieved and whose are forgotten.
나쁜 애도/Bad Lament responds to this injustice through a queer lens on mourning. The exhibition gathers artists working in performance, video, installation, and drawing. Together, they propose grief not as ritual perfection, but as protest; fragmented, messy, necessary.
Drawing from Korean shamanism and Jewish mourning, the project offers alternative, de-institutional forms of remembrance. This is a space for “bad mourning,” where grief that doesn’t follow rules becomes an act of resistance, and a collective affirmation of life.
나쁜 애도/Bad Lament was selected through apexart’s Open Call. For more information and images visit https://apexart.org/minseonkim.php or contact maryam.ghoreishi@apexart.org
