Installation view of 《Bulging Scenery》 (Artspace Hyeong, 2019) ©Chang Kon Lim

We gaze upon a landscape filled with red, fragmented, or conjoined bodies occupying the walls and floor. These male figures raise their buttocks high, exposing their genitals and anuses. Crouched down, they expose, paradoxically and most boldly, an emotion that might be shame or timidity. Hierarchies shaped by the gender binary—terms like “emotional,” “passive,” and “being penetrated”—are wielded against the vulnerable, under the guise of exclusion or protection, othering them. This figurative landscape compels the viewer to confront the imagery and scenes of violence surrounding the consumption of queer male bodies. Male-centered order becomes a trap that confines, dismembers, and distorts queer men. In the gaps between these bodies, can one sense a landscape in which traps lurk amid the white walls and floors?

Installation view of 《Bulging Scenery》 (Artspace Hyeong, 2019) ©Chang Kon Lim

The painted figures are men who appear outwardly dismembered and severed, and inwardly hollow. Part of what “emptiness” signifies here is their position outside the normalized category of men within dominant systems. Chang Kon Lim refers to the multi-panel frames that support the paintings as “traps.” His initial effort to build a frame for those outside the norm has evolved into the visual manifestation of that very frame as a trap—literally enclosing the male bodies he paints. He begins his process by assembling several panels into a form that evokes a male figure caught in a particular posture within the boundaries of the frame. The edges of these bodies often extend beyond the frame, with parts of the body severed. The brushstrokes that shape the body are thin enough to reveal the panel’s texture underneath, resembling the skin of an inflated balloon. The artist describes his brushwork as “scribbled as if shouting.” As this energy accumulates over time, his recent works have become redder in tone, with depictions of skin and muscle swelling ever more vividly. Though the figures fill the canvas, they are still called “vacant men”—hollow bodies, red shells, and images alone. Where, and in what form, do the gaps left behind—(or erased from) the objectified queer body and its history—reside?

Chang Kon Lim, A Vacant Man, 2018, Oil on wooden panel, 133x145cm ©Chang Kon Lim

Even if distorted by the trap, the figures’ poses and gazes depict acts of exposing sexual behaviors or emotions that fall outside “normative” notions of sexuality. At the same time, these images resist the benevolent validation from a heteronormative male gaze, asserting the sheer presence and aliveness of queer existence as an act of long resistance.

Looking at each figure one by one, we follow their gaze into empty space, only to encounter another fragmented body, another gaze. A single fragmented body and the gaze it casts become a shouting voice that collides with others. Just as the term “queer”—once a mark of exclusion and correction—has transformed into a name for solidarity, the scenery formed by these “vacant men” becomes a chorus of queer voices, resounding outward into the world.

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