Circle Dance of Divine Queer Futures, 2022, Urethane resin, copper tubing, rhinestones, ⌀ 120 cm

Circle Dance of Divine Queer Futures is a circular sculpture with a structure of hands holding each other. This work is an embrace of those who are alienated and unjustified in binary, heterosexual, and patriarchal systems, arguing for queerness as a future-oriented, profoundly utopian mode of being and doing in the world. As a community made up of various identities, the act of holding hands together creates empathy and solidarity, symbolizing a confrontation of past mistakes and discrimination, referencing historical liberation of struggles and collectivity.

Herma Herculine , 2017, Pigmented plaster, resin, MDF, 104 x 41 x 46 cm

Herma Herculine takes its name from Herculine Barbin(1838-1868), a French intersex person, known as a hermaphrodite. A Herma was a rectangular pillar in ancient Greece and Rome featuring a male head and genitals. Placed at the entrance of a building, the pillar was believed to ward off evil spirits. Here, the artist reinterprets the story of the Herculine and Herma statue, which was a symbol of masculinity and strength. By sculpting a hermaphrodite’s penis and its hand as one Herma, Kwak not only dissects traditional notions of gender binary, but also probes a broader range of gender identity, offering the new possibility of a radical body form that challenges the binary gender categorization.

Buxom Sparty Breastplate , 2021 Rhinestones, glitter, resin, wood, 119 x 69 x 28 cm

The artist created Buxom Sparty Breastplate during the artist’s residency program in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University. Kwak found elements pertinent to queer bodies in sculpture while she was studying and casting “the Spartan,” the statue of Michigan State’s mascot representing strength.

Exhibited along the sculpture is Spartan Impression (Torso), a print made from a silicone mold of the University’s Spartan statue. The printed version is a deconstructed cast of the Spartan’s body.

The Mother Mountain Institute , 2017~ , Motor, plaster, paper mache, panel, sound, drawings, texts, size variable

As an ongoing project that began in 2017, The Mother Mountain Institute consists of a large-scale kinetic sound installation, representing the universe, accompanied by a series of drawings of mountains, and text. Inside the room the visitor can hear two testimonials of mothers whose children were stolen and trafficked to the transnational industry.
The Mother Mountain Institute aims to contribute to dismantle the colonial narratives and myths surrounding the transnational adoption system. Myths that adoptees were orphans, while in reality for example 95% of the Korean mothers of the 200.000-300.000 children who were sent abroad for adoption were or are still alive. The work was created based on the artist’s desire to bring forward the stories of the mothers who have been silenced by the lucrative adoption industry, often operating from Christian, evangelical backgrounds.
A global industry that found its inception in Korea, after the Korean War, and its model has been copied to other countries, and follows a pattern where former colonized countries or countries that have been subject to imperialistic wars (such as the Korean War), have been serving for decades as the suppliers for the adoption market in the US, Europe and Australia.
The installation piece honors the mothers who lost their children, the children’s hearts missing their mothers, and the invisible power surrounding them. Inside the room-size box, which depicts an expanded European orrery of the 19th century, the sun and moon orbit around each other, symbolizing the mothers and their children looking for each other. Alternately the mountain speaks, and shares words of consolation and the work itself becomes a shelter and a meditation space to heal the collective emotional wounds caused by international adoption. Drawings and watercolors portraying mountains which are known for their spiritual qualities that have been made in the countries where the artist traveled to conduct research for The Mother Mountain Institute are also exhibited as part of the work.

Brussels, 2016 , 2017, HD/DCP, digital film, 33 min

Brussels, 2016 is framed as a letter to artist Sara Sejin Chang’s unknown mother in South Korea. Set in the months following the Brussels bombings of March 2016, and just before the “Brexit” referendum, Chang’s film captures the city of Brussels at a vulnerable moment. Functioning as a portrait of the city, the film shows Brussels’ European institutions, WIELS, lush parks, as well as the various communities that intersect in Chang’s life: her fellow artists, her queer friendship group, and her Roma and Syrian refugee neighbours. Brussels appears as a series of parallel realities, brought together by Chang’s gaze.

Chang made the film while participating in the WIELS Residency Programme, where she uses her position as both inside and outside an institution and a country to consider the uncertain status of WIELS’s unofficial residents: a community of displaced Roma and Syrian refugees living around the edges of the art centre. In presenting their makeshift home and in reflecting on the antagonism she has witnessed towards immigrants from former colonies and Belgian people of colour, Chang invites the viewer to consider the broader political narrative within which such hostility has arisen. In her poetic rendering, she exposes the “foundational fictions” that underlie the city of Brussels, and the united Europe it purports to stand for. Through the encounters that structure the film, Chang proposes that intimate interactions are necessary for us to collectively repair our society and imagine how things could be. Such interactions include Chang going on a walk through the woods with her dogs, meeting a friend’s newborn baby, getting to know a stray cat, and falling in love.

Installation view of Gallery 1

Installation view of Gallery 1

Installation view of Gallery 2

Installation view of Gallery 2