INTRO: Kang Seung Lee mines queer archives to underscore the power of legacy, excavating in particular the histories of artistic figures—known and unknown—who lost their lives to AIDs. As acts of preservation, imagination, and resistance, these excavations remind us that even in queer circles, even in 2021, white Western biases still prevail. The question of whom we remember and whom we don’t, like drawing, remains central to Lee’s multimedia practice, as does his desire to forge intergenerational connections.
The artist employs drawing as both a tool of appropriation and an embodiment of loss. His meticulous reproductions of artworks, documents, photographs, and objects limn not just his subject’s individual contributions to queer art and activism, but how their stories intersect with others across time and place. Such yoking reveals the archive’s potential to bring people together in a utopian vision of community that José Esteban Muñoz deemed “queer futurity.” In the conversation that follows, Lee shares how growing up in the generation after AIDs, in a South Korea entrenched in homophobia, influenced his work, helping him find in the archive the possibility of activism and belonging.
https://foundwork.art/dialogues/kang-seung-lee