While the artistic excitement that swept through Seoul during the Frieze and Kiaf art fairs in early September has settled, the city's vibrant creative scene continues to thrive. Three compelling exhibitions by Korean artists now offer art enthusiasts the opportunity to experience the lingering energy of that earlier cultural wave, presented in more intimate and contemplative settings.

The first exhibition, "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me," marks an unprecedented collaboration between Seoul-born artist Lee Kang-seung and American artist Candice Lin at Gallery Hyundai. According to Lin, their artistic connection follows two distinct paths: the reclamation of queer history that often remains undocumented or exists only in speculation, and the revolutionary concept of viewing archives as living entities that exist not only in documents but within the human body itself.

Lee Kang-seung has consistently explored overlooked aspects of modern LGBTQ history and AIDS activism through his signature techniques of gold-threaded embroidery, material fragment assemblages, and graphite drawings. His work creates a new form of queer genealogy that transcends both national boundaries and generational divides. For this exhibition, he focuses specifically on skin and the human body as living repositories of memory, most powerfully demonstrated in his new video installation titled "Skin."

The centerpiece work features the fluid movements of octogenarian queer dancer Meg Harper, whose aged skin and scars are captured in unflinching, intimate close-ups. These detailed frames transform skin and muscle memory into a visceral documentation of a fully lived life. "I wanted to explore how dancers, who use their bodies as their language, reflect on aging," Lee explained. "Within the course of aging, I believe an individual's history seeps into every layer of the skin."

Candice Lin brings her distinctive approach of utilizing organic substances including mold, bacteria, and fermentation as artistic media to expose the hidden fractures within colonial history, race, gender, and sexuality. In the Seoul exhibition, she shifts her focus to examine the bodies of non-human subjects: plants, minerals, and animals. Her most compelling contributions include the edible drawings "Eat Me" and the thought-provoking video "Feline Messages to the World," where she adopts a cat's perspective to examine the complex relationships humans form with domesticated animals—bonds that intertwine care with domination and violence. This joint exhibition continues through October 5.

At Arario Gallery, Lee Jin-ju presents "Discontinuouscontinuity," a solo exhibition that showcases her distinctively unsettling artistic vision. Lee's work immediately captures viewers' attention through her surreal combinations of human and animal forms interwoven with various natural and artificial objects, creating dreamlike worlds that exist at the boundaries of subconscious fear. Every surface in her paintings displays hyperrealistic detail, capturing even the finest hairs and wrinkles, yet the figures themselves maintain an emotional distance with hidden faces, averted eyes, and bodies emerging from pitch-black voids.

Beneath this disturbing imagery flows a subtle emotional undercurrent. While never explicitly stated, Lee's personal trauma—a brief childhood kidnapping when she was four years old—quietly haunts her work, creating tension between beauty, eeriness, and vulnerability. Her paintings function less as literal narratives and more as explorations of subconscious memory, investigating the unseen, indescribable, and unknowable aspects of human experience.

This latest exhibition represents another chapter in Lee's ongoing exploration of shaped canvases and spatial experimentation. Among the exhibition's highlights is the double-sided canvas "Concave Tears-Convex Courage," which presents a quintessentially unsettling scene: pools of festering blood collecting in a snowy landscape populated by people with turned backs, pig carcasses, moss-covered rocks, and scattered crime scene evidence markers. Equally striking is "Replies," an installation featuring 29 paintings of disembodied hands floating in velvety darkness.

"Hands can convey a lot more things than faces. But they're less direct, leaving more room for interpretation," Lee explained at the gallery. "In my work, so many details are rendered with precision, but at the same time, so much else is concealed. In East Asian aesthetics, the very act of concealment can amplify what is revealed." This philosophy guides Lee's artistic approach, layering meticulously visible elements with deliberately hidden meanings. The exhibition runs until October 9.

The third major exhibition, "PROTOTYPE," features Ok Seung-cheol's latest survey at the Lotte Museum of Art in southern Seoul. Ok's distinctive figures, characterized by large, stylized eyes and enigmatic expressions, possess an uncannily familiar quality, as if summoned from half-remembered scenes in anime or video games. In today's post-digital visual culture, such imagery proliferates endlessly, being replicated, recomposed, and consumed in infinite variations.

Ok utilizes these reproducible forms to question the meaning of originality in an era where images are no longer tied to single, traceable sources. His artistic process involves extracting these images from the immaterial digital realm and rendering them in physical paintings and sculptures, thereby giving tangible weight and uniqueness to what was once infinitely replicable.

The "PROTOTYPE" exhibition immerses visitors in this conceptual vision through softly glowing, mirrored rooms where Ok's crisply outlined canvases and gigantic 3D-printed sculptures radiate an otherworldly presence. While the experience becomes notably repetitive after several rooms—with nearly identical faces reappearing in different scales and media—this sense of unwelcome déjà vu may be precisely Ok's intended effect. He places viewers within a maze of endless reproduction that gradually dulls the senses.

Ok's recent painting "Tylenol" makes this metaphor explicit, comparing the numbing familiarity of recurring images to the body's diminishing response to medication after repeated doses. This ambitious exhibition continues through October 26, offering viewers an extended opportunity to engage with Ok's commentary on digital culture and artistic reproduction.