Art Metropole

#16959

Liminal Figures

Writers

Hyunjoo Byeon and Je Yun Moon

Editor

Kavior Moon

The Floorplan / GYOPO

Price

$41.50

Date

2026

Publisher

The Floorplan / GYOPO

Format

Anthologies

ISBN

978-3-00-087108-5

Size

12.5 × 21 × 3.5 cm

Length

372 pp

Genre

Interview, Asian Art & Artists, Contemporary Art

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.

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