Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Moon has held solo exhibitions including 《No Future》 (Space illi, Seoul, 2021), 《Wish You Were Coming Here》 (Yeon Rainbow x Oson Doson, Suwon, 2020), and 《We Will Always Cross Each Other》 (Keep in Touch, Seoul, 2019).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

In addition, Moon has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Spectrosynthesis Seoul》 (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2026), 《Into Other Rivers》 (Art Archives Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2025), 《off-site 2: Eleven Episodes》 (Kukje Gallery and (Together)(Together), Seoul, 2025), 《Spread Her Seeds》 (Space illi, Seoul, 2020), and 《QueerArch》 (Hapjungjigu, Seoul, 2019).

Residencies (Selected)

Moon Sanghoon was also an artist-in-residence at the FABER Residency in Spain in 2018.

Originality & Identity

Moon Sanghoon’s work begins by asking how the lives of lesbians, queer people, and women-minorities are pushed into invisibility or misunderstanding, and under what conditions they can be spoken of again. The artist addresses the question of boundaries through the body and relationships of the individual, words exchanged within communities, encounters, and the sense of failure.

As seen in 〈Chronicles of My Failure〉(2017-2018) and Unknown Fax(2017-2018), Moon Sanghoon has focused less on completed narratives of success than on failure, undelivered messages, and states of misaligned communication. This concern moves toward anonymous relationships within lesbian communities and questions of the queer body.
 
Moon Sanghoon’s first solo exhibition 《We will always cross each other》(Keep in Touch, 2019) foregrounded the existence of lesbians, which had not been sufficiently addressed within art history or institutions. The ‘Hand Genital’(2019) series is a photographic work in which lovers who identify as lesbians photographed each other’s hands, revealing the sensory and sexual meanings that hands hold within lesbian relationships.

While the work appears like typological photography, it simultaneously questions binary standards that distinguish sex and relationships through a genital-centered framework. Hello, Strangers(2018) uses a location tracker to confirm the moments when the artist and an anonymous stranger may have passed each other over the course of a month, revealing the expectations, distance, chance, and uncertainty involved in lesbian encounters.
 
The 2020 solo exhibition 《Wish You Were Coming Here》(Yeon Rainbow x Oson Doson, 2020) brought anonymous voices drifting within lesbian communities into the exhibition space. The artist took as the exhibition’s point of departure the culture of lesbians who, after being blocked by ex-lovers, search online communities for someone who will not return and receive comfort from complete strangers.

In the dark exhibition space, viewers’ messages continue through a recording device, leaving only voices and words without bodies. In this work, lesbians appear not as objects consumed by the voyeuristic gaze of outsiders, but as beings who ask after one another, share loss, and connect through anonymity.
 
In 《No Future》(Space illi, 2021), Moon Sanghoon’s concern shifts from lesbian communities and relationships to the boundaries in which the body itself is placed. The artist asks about the difference between illegality and legality, normality and abnormality, the ordinary and the strange, and attempts to directly embody the future they imagine through their body.

No Future: Beards(2021) deals with the process of consulting for beard transplantation and the desire for an ideal self, revealing a complex position between assigned gender and gender expression, masculinity and non-masculinity. Here, the body is not evidence of a fixed identity, but a site where social standards and personal desires collide and are readjusted.

Style & Contents

Moon Sanghoon has developed their practice across video, photography, installation, performance, archives, and exhibition-making. What matters in their work is less a single medium than the question of what form can reveal a particular relationship or situation.

Hello, Strangers visualizes the possibility of passing by an anonymous stranger through single-channel video, location data, and the format of a contract, while Sense of Touch(2018) deals with touch and bodily sensation through the medium of video.

FUTURE QUEER IS HERE(2019) is a photo spot installation made with a neon sign on acrylic, inviting viewers to take photographs beneath the sentence “The future queer is here,” while bringing into the work the way queerness is consumed and circulated as an image.
 
The ‘Hand Genital’ series was produced through collaboration with various photographers and presented as photographs printed on tracing paper. In this work, rather than directly taking lesbian couples as photographic subjects, the artist creates a structure in which the partners photograph each other’s hands.

The way the photographer and model switch and overlap within a romantic relationship functions as a form that reveals lesbian sexuality through the sensations and gazes inside the relationship, rather than representing it through an external gaze. The hand becomes a tool of contact and an organ of sensation, while also becoming an image that unsettles conventional genital-centered ideas of sex.
 
In 《Wish You Were Coming Here》, texts from online communities and anonymous voices become the primary materials of the exhibition. The recording device placed on a table, the dark space, and the messages left by viewers turn the exhibition into a kind of confessional and a site for words that were never sent.

This work does not stop at explaining the culture and emotions of lesbian communities, but allows viewers to leave anonymous voices themselves and imagine other voices. Here, the exhibition functions less as a space for showing completed objects than as a place where invisible relationships and words briefly gather and disappear.
 
In 《No Future》, the artist’s own body becomes a more direct medium. Tattoos, a beard transplantation consultation, the nagging voice of the artist’s mother, and a sign-language interpretation video are all composed as devices that reveal the relationship between the body and norms.

The act of inscribing the image of an ideal self the artist had wanted to resemble onto their body is not a way of drawing a utopia outside the self, but a way of engraving it onto the boundary of the skin. This form also connects to Moon’s experience as the drag king performer “John Johnson,” their curatorial projects such as 《Lesbian!》(Outhouse, 2019) and 《Failure Exhibition》(Plan B Project Space, 2020), and their participation in the planning and adaptation team for 《DRAGxYeoseong Gukgeuk》.

For Moon Sanghoon, art is not only the production of images, but also a practice of moving the body, creating relationships, and composing scenes of community.

Topography & Continuity

Through their work, Moon Sanghoon has continued to deal with the existence of lesbians and their communities, queer bodies and gender expression, failure and anonymity, and the question of boundaries.

They have explored the uncertainty of relationships through the sense of failure and non-delivery, and through anonymous encounters, while in 《We will always cross each other》, they revealed beings made invisible within art history and society through lesbian hands, encounters, and images of the future queer.

Later, in 《Wish You Were Coming Here》, Moon brought the voices of online lesbian communities into the exhibition space, and in 《No Future》, they dealt with questions of normality and abnormality, masculinity and non-masculinity, the future and impossibility through their own body.
 
The artist visualizes, through the structure of their work, how queer identity actually forms relationships, is spoken, misunderstood, and disappears. While many queer practices focus on the visibility of identity or historical archives, Moon Sanghoon does not overlook the awkwardness, failure, hesitation, anonymous comfort, and the gap between fantasy and reality that exist in between.

In Hello, Strangers, the encounter is never fully completed; in 《Wish You Were Coming Here》, messages remain without certainty about their recipients; and in 《No Future》, the future appears not as an optimistic promise but as an opaque question inscribed onto the body.
 
As both an artist and curator, Moon Sanghoon has continued to develop individual practice alongside communal forms of practice. 《Lesbian!》 brought records of queer women’s movements and lesbian culture into the exhibition space, encouraging viewers to reconsider the genealogy of lesbian art and activism that had not been sufficiently addressed within art institutions.

Recently expanding their work through exhibitions at major institutions such as Art Archives Seoul Museum of Art and Kukje Gallery, Moon Sanghoon appears to be continuing to experiment more broadly with forms of queer life through sensations that repeatedly misalign and reconnect between the body and relationships, community and archive.