Agnes Questionmark at Ilmin Museum of Art, Soeul: Gi.Gi.Gi: Trials and Errors Exhibition

Ilmin Museum of Art (Director Kim Taeryung) is pleased to present Gi.Gi.Gi: Trials and Errors (hereinafter Gi.Gi.Gi), a group exhibition on view from April 1 to May 31, 2026. Marking the centenary of the building’s architecture, the exhibition inaugurates a sequence of relay programs extending through the end of 2026.

The museum traces its origins to the Dong-A Ilbo headquarters, completed in 1926. Since then, the site has weathered the turbulence of modern and contemporary Korean history. Here, chance and causation have accumulated, resonating with the conditions of our times, where nothing remains entirely the same or entirely new. Gi.Gi.Gi understands this sensation as a way in which the contemporary persists, proposing it as a starting point for imagining a space “outside” unyielding systems.

Each “Gi” in Gi.Gi.Gi represents different Chinese characters that are pronounced the same in Korean. The exhibition brings together seven artists (or teams) whose works address the “weird” (怪) that exceeds the normative, the “self” (己) that arises from chaos through its unfixed state of being, and the “energy” (氣)—such as reverberations, currents, or vibrations—that is difficult to measure.

While their works may initially appear to be “trial and error,” they are far from a process of seeking a correct answer. Instead, the works enact a relentless practice of error, in an attempt to awaken from a polished reality.

 

Agnes Questionmark transports the medical interventions of the MTF transition process into her artistic practice, including video installation and sculpture. Viewing diagnosis and surgery as political acts of surveillance, power, and control, she coalesces with a tentacled species as a means of entering a “trans” state of hyperimmersion.

Yoo Jio explores an aesthetic that involves the appropriation of established systems, whether this involves confinement to set frames or pathways. Yoo weaves together substances of unclear origin and function to create sculptures as crystallizations of individual anxiety and trembling affect.

Hong Eunju views contemporary technologies as a magnifying glass, amplifying human desire and deprivation. She focuses on the multiple emotions and substances that emerge when technology encounters systems.

Eoghan Ryan brings together historical archives and 15 years of newspaper scraps sent by his father into weird fables. His new work for the exhibition, Terrible Simplifiers, links the hall interior and the building’s exterior (the Ilmin Museum of Art’s rooftop and the “LUUX” digital display on the Dong-A Ilbo building’s exterior) and extends the questions of how visual symbols acquire and utilize authority beyond the exhibition.

Jennifer Carvalho presents archaeological paintings that “excavate” the ideas and promises that art has offered our era, drawing on a vast range of references, from religious art to contemporary film stills. Her paintings exceed mere restoration of the past and experiment with the possibilities of contamination and transformation through artistic intervention.

Unmake Lab uncovers how our cultural errors as human beings are amplified through the byproducts of artificial intelligence.

Finally, Song Min Jung focuses on the characteristic atmospheres of the era we are living in. Encompassing deliberately exalted spectacle and ordinary, uneventful images, her works touch upon both the solidity and the softness of our times.

Rather than presuming a transcendental exit hidden in the existing system, Gi. Gi. Gi focuses on the unexpected external sensations that arise from the fissures and creaks of reality. In this attempt, the exhibition adopts as a foundation the omens of an “endlessness” of contemporaneity—a perpetual loop in which nothing ever fully ends.